At the Hanover Fair this week in Germany, ABB announced that it would partner with IBM to bring together its industry-leading digital offering, ABB Ability, with IBM Watson’s Internet of Things (IoT) cognitive capabilities.
The new suite of solutions developed by ABB and IBM will help companies address some of their biggest challenges, such as improving quality control, reducing downtime and increasing speed and yield of industrial processes. The first two joint industry solutions will bring real-time so-called cognitive insights to plants and smart grids. First, ABB Ability will automatically capture real-time production images. Then IBM Watson IoT for Manufacturing will analyze those images for defects. As material flows through a process, the system will alert the user to critical faults, improving quality control.
“This powerful combination marks truly the next level of industrial technology, moving beyond currently connected systems that simply gather data, to industrial operations and machines that use data to sense, analyze, optimize and take actions that drive greater uptime, speed and yield for industrial customers,” ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer said.
