Timothy Morano
November 21, 2024 18:49
AVEVA and NVIDIA leverage AI to transform industrial automation and improve efficiency and safety in energy, power, and chemicals through dynamic simulation and deep reinforcement learning.
AVEVA, a renowned industrial software company, is collaborating with NVIDIA to advance autonomous operations in the energy, power, and chemical industries. According to NVIDIA’s blog post, by integrating AVEVA’s dynamic simulation platform with NVIDIA’s Raptor deep reinforcement learning (DRL) engine, the partnership aims to transform traditional industrial processes into fully autonomous operations.
Industrial Operations Transformation
This collaboration focuses on leveraging AI to create sophisticated process simulation solutions. This approach is expected to significantly reduce unplanned downtime, maximize production, and improve product quality. The integration of AI-based DRL agents promotes advanced reasoning and iterative planning, pushing the boundaries of industrial control, system-level autonomy, and fully autonomous plant development.
Solving the challenges of industrial automation
Existing control techniques often suffer from transient events, such as unexpected disturbances in industrial plants. In these situations, operators typically rely on manual controls to stabilize the plant, which can have costly consequences. The shift toward greater industrial autonomy promises multiple benefits, including improved safety, improved operational efficiency, cost savings, and improved environmental sustainability.
Strategic cooperation with Schneider Electric
Together with Schneider Electric, AVEVA and NVIDIA deploy expertise across industrial process and computing infrastructure use cases. This includes using digital process twins to train autonomous AI agents and implement high-quality digital twins for real-time monitoring and control. Additionally, data center reference designs are being developed to support AI workloads to improve deployment speed and reliability.
Results of the AVEVA-NVIDIA Integration
Through their collaboration, AVEVA’s dynamic simulations were tested with NVIDIA’s Raptor engine. Simulation builds a dynamic twin of a process plant for a variety of applications, including operator training and process design. The integration enables large-scale reinforcement learning to optimize industrial processes using accelerated computing on-premises or in the cloud.
A successful application is in the field of chemical distillation. DRL agents trained with AVEVA Dynamic Simulation were able to stabilize the process twice as fast as manual operators and maintain temperature and product quality even during large feed changes.
future prospects
AVEVA plans to use Raptor to test, productize, and scale dynamic simulations. This includes working with leading energy companies to test solutions and ensure confidence before full-scale deployment. AVEVA aims to leverage the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform to streamline training and deployment processes with no-code workflows and accelerate the integration of AI-based solutions in industrial environments.
For more insight into collaboration, take a look at the AVEVA and NVIDIA partnership.
Image source: Shutterstock