I have frequently found interesting pieces on Forbes, and this week read Toward smart production: Machine intelligence in business.
The article is about Vistra, a US power producer:
The company has been on a journey to drive operational excellence across its generation portfolio. Launched in 2016, its Operational Performance Initiative has driven a step-change improvement in the efficiency of its assets, generating hundreds of millions in incremental EBITDA along the way.
To maintain and improve its position, Vistra is continually looking for the tools, technologies, and approaches that will help it achieve the next level of performance. Most recently, the company has turned to digital and analytics, including machine intelligence (MI).
They built a system that:
…automatically analyzes hundreds of inputs in real-time using AI. Every 30 minutes, the system generates recommendations for tweaks and adjustments that operators can apply to maximize the performance of the plant. The heat-rate optimizer has been running for roughly nine months, and the plant has been consistently running 1 percent more efficiently. That might not seem like much, but it’s worth millions of dollars per year, drives down greenhouse-gas emissions, and frees worker time to focus on other tasks. Scaled across Vistra’s large and…
