GE has developed a new industrial data lake software system to help businesses manage big data, which could help increase fuel efficiency in the aviation industry and beyond.
In a 2013 pilot, GE Aviation collected information on 15,000 flights from 25 different airlines at about 14 gigabytes of metrics per flight. With the industrial data lake approach, GE was able to integrate terabytes of full flight data for the first time in industry to produce measurable cost savings of 10x and significantly reduce analysis time from months to days. The company expects the data collection to grow to 10 million flights and 1,500 terabytes of full flight operational data by 2015.
For customers such as AirAsia, this means savings of more than one percent of their fuel bill each year.
Developed on foundational software elements from big data firm Pivotal, the industrial data lake will integrate with Predix, GE's software platform for the Industrial Internet that provides a standard and secure way to connect machines, analytics, data and people and is built for the scale of industrial data. This announcement builds on the strategic partnership between GE and Pivotal to jointly develop a new data architecture that meets the requirements of industrial data and critical infrastructure operations.
All information must be converted into recognizable formats before it can be used — a process that has become the bottleneck when managing industrial Big Data. GE says conventional approaches such as data warehouses can be too slow, expensive and inflexible with nearly 80 percent of project time spent on gathering and preparing the data for analysis.
The new system offers a 2,000-times performance improvement on time to analysis, making it possible for companies to focus resources on turning the data into actionable information for increased productivity.
The data lake software undoubtedly will be welcomed with open arms by the aviation industry, which has been exploring ways to decrease its hefty environmental footprint. For example, Boeing, South African Airways (SAA) and SkyNRG recently announced a collaboration to make sustainable aviation biofuel from a new type of tobacco plant. This initiative builds on cooperation between Boeing and SAA to develop renewable jet fuel in ways that support South Africa's goals for public health as well as economic and rural development.
GE’s innovations have been paying off big for the company. Earlier this month, the company said its more than $2 billion in research and development for ecomagination and healthymagination innovations in 2013 generated $28 billion.
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Founder & Principal Consultant, Hower Impact
Mike Hower is the founder of Hower Impact — a boutique consultancy delivering best-in-class strategic communication advisory and support for corporate sustainability, ESG and climate tech.
Published Aug 13, 2014 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST