Industrial firms and contractors stand to benefit from emerging innovations in remote-monitoring technology. With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics is becoming a valuable means to monitor engineering performance and ensure safety and reliability of myriad industrial operations.


Remote monitoring of industrial systems is advancing, and thanks to more exact and accurate sensors and data capture, precise monitoring of engineering equipment and systems is possible. 


The IoT has also created a market of suppliers able to support such valuable data retrieval. With the advent of so-called “big data,” exciting, new solutions are available using complex algorithms that compute and process it. Better sensor technology and voluminous data retrieval have produced equipment and systems that are “smarter” than ever. 


According to Toronto-based research firm Technavio, IoT advances are providing network interfaces with the use of “smart machines,” which monitor and control various objects using microcontrollers through the Internet. Technavio said the global IoT market was valued at close to $196.3 billion two years ago and has been growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 31 percent.


Technavio emphasizes technology advances in hardware and devices used to enable the IoT. Finite element analysis (FEA) aids the advanced design of such support products; this is a very lucrative trend to watch in IoT pickup devices.


“The need to develop and manufacture products that comply with regulations worldwide is expected to drive the application of FEA in electrical and electronics until 2019,” said Amrita Choudhury, one of Technavio’s lead industry analysts for product life cycle management research. “It has led to the emergence of specialized inspection agencies to examine entire product development and manufacturing processes.”


Matt Gould, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Arria NLG, a London firm that extracts information from complex data sources and communicates that information in natural language, called the IoT the “hottest new topic in performance monitoring for electrical systems.”


“We are now able to collect data on virtually every aspect of monitoring systems,” he said. “Collecting data is wonderful, but if you cannot make sense of it and use it to drive business improvements, what is the use?”


For engineering systems, retrieved data is fed into a chain of processing that includes IoT technology, big data and artificial intelligence. This paves the way for improvements in how we use, interact with and automate monitoring technology. Gould cited a massive opportunity on the horizon: the growth of natural language generation (NLG) technologies.


“NLG systems have the ability to mimic senior engineers and can be configured to analyze and describe events in the same way as the expert,” he said. “NLG acts as a virtual senior engineer in control centers, diagnosing issues and writing everything from work orders and press releases on outages to personalized usage reports. By using NLG technology, operations experts are freed from the burden of constant reporting and can focus on more important issues.”


He said the ability of the network to plainly communicate the system status and what needs to be done will enable utilities to improve asset performance, uptime and remediation time. The time gap between an issue occurring, analysis of that issue, and the completion of a work order to fix the problem will decrease from hours to minutes. As these gains are achieved, NLG technology application will ultimately result in bottom-line margin improvements. Fully articulated networks may be possible in the next five years.


For electrical contractors (ECs), this presents opportunity—particularly in the utility industry.


“Many large-scale investments in systems control and insight have already been made as well as huge investments in control technology and systems integration,” Gould said. “In addition, most utilities providers have dashboard reporting systems with command and control centers. Just as the expertise of control engineers can be configured into NLG platforms, the same can be done for other groups of experts within the organization. For example, NLG can be configured to analyze and report on parts and spares information to ensure that work, repair and service orders flow easily to the field. With NLG, the system could be configured to provide insights on smart billing and consumer usage patterns, and every customer would instantly receive a personalized analysis of their power or water usage.”


Data is valuable. It can lead to economical operation, prevent safety mishaps and provide granular operating parameters for greater efficiency.


As remote monitoring matures, firms should be willing to invest even more; there will likely be a favorable return on investment. ECs that are aware of this will be valuable to potential customers, including utilities, industrial operators and any contractor or subcontractor that supports them.


“The ability of a cognitive artificial intelligence system to act as an expert will mean even complex systems will become streamlined with computers handling more rote tasks and monitoring requirements,” Gould said.