Software company C3 AI announced that Shell has scaled its predictive-maintenance program to monitor and maintain more than 10,000 pieces of equipment. Artificial-intelligence (AI) predictive maintenance allows companies to identify equipment degradation and failures before they happen. Monitored equipment at Shell includes control valves, pumps, compressors, and other critical components.
“Monitoring 10,000 pieces of critical equipment with AI-enabled predictive maintenance is an important milestone for Shell—an ambitious target we had set for 2021 and successfully achieved,” said Dan Jeavons, vice president of computational science and digital innovation at Shell.
According to C3 AI, to monitor 10,000 pieces of equipment, the technical infrastructure handles 20 billion rows of data weekly from more than 3 million sensors. Nearly 11,000 machine-learning models allow the system to make more than 15 million predictions each day.
“Shell’s deployment of AI predictive maintenance at global scale is an impressive achievement, delivering significant economic, environmental, and human safety benefits,” said C3 AI CEO Thomas M. Siebel. “We are extremely proud to have helped Shell reach this milestone.”
In a news release, Shell said it plans to accelerate its predictive maintenance program this year and explore additional uses for the C3 AI Suite, including asset integrity, production optimization, system optimization, safety, and sustainability. In June 2021, Shell and C3 AI announced a 5-year renewal of their strategic agreement to accelerate the deployment of AI and machine-learning applications on the C3 AI Suite across Shell.
Shell has commercialized its AI predictive-maintenance applications built with the C3 AI software. The solutions are available to the general market through the Open Energy AI initiative, an open ecosystem with the goal of advancing the use and adoption of AI in the energy sector, of which Shell, C3 AI, Baker Hughes, and Microsoft are founding members.