The AspenTech team is excited to share that we won the Technology Excellence Award 2020 for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Manufacturing awarded by the Singapore Business Review at its virtual awards ceremony earlier this month. This win strengthens the company’s view that capital-intensive companies need an effective AI strategy in order to capture significant benefits in safety, reliability and maintenance in a scalable and cost-effective manner. 

In 2016 AspenTech acquired Mtell, a startup that was founded in 2006 and had achieved breakthroughs in creating a system that leverages the skills, experience and work processes of its users, while AI-based software does the heavy lifting via analytics and machine learning. And without requiring the plant and maintenance personnel to be data scientists. This is much like the way in which the iPhone embeds technology to enable casual users to easily and quickly benefit from a smart device using applications like GPS or a virtual assistant. This approach resulted in the usability, simplicity, scalability and mass adoption of the Aspen Mtell^® solution by customers for predictive and prescriptive maintenance to reduce unplanned downtime. 

With a simple and intuitive user interface and a methodical work process, Aspen Mtell develops anomaly and failure agents for target equipment and assets to enable more accurate detection of anomalies and to outline explicit patterns of failures, along with prescriptive advice on correcting the discovered conditions. Precise alerts are available months and weeks in advance – not just days – and these agents are agnostic to industry, equipment types and manufacturing processes. The technology is agile, flexible, and takes just a few hours to construct (versus months) and is transferrable across fleets of assets.

Last year, Aspen Mtell prescriptive maintenance software was selected by Southeast Asia’s integrated petrochemical pioneer, IRPC PLC for use at its refinery and petrochemical plants in Rayong Province, Thailand. IRPC operates a fully integrated petrochemical complex with facilities to support the business, such as a deep seaport, tank farm and power plant. IRPC selected Aspen Mtell software to increase plant reliability and reduce maintenance cost. Other factors driving the decision include ease of deployment, accurate, early detection of asset failures, prevention of false alarms and the ability to scale across the enterprise.

Khun Narong, VP of Maintenance, IRPC PLC, said: “Congratulations to AspenTech for winning the Technology Excellence Award 2020 for AI in Manufacturing by the Singapore Business Review. IRPC is pleased to be showcased for selecting Aspen Mtell prescriptive maintenance software to mitigate unplanned downtime. With the deployment of Aspen Mtell software, the company is adopting Industry 4.0 predictive and prescriptive maintenance best practices.” 

The Aspen Mtell team will continue to innovate to simplify the development of better agents and  even faster new agents with abilities to decipher causation (versus correlation) by incorporating greater domain knowledge to address complex degradation problems in various industries such as oil and gas, heavy chemicals, metals and mining, wind farms, etc. 

With the company’s latest advances in AI and machine learning, AspenTech’s purpose-built software portfolio enables companies to weave a digital thread throughout the design, operation and maintenance of their facilities and value chains. This will enable companies to unlock higher levels of performance to be the industry leaders of tomorrow.

For more information, read the full announcement by the Singapore Business Review.