Mary-Louise Hoffman
IBM has partnered with the University of South Carolina to develop analytics tools to help maintenance professionals detect when a piece of equipment is nearing failure, the Columbia Regional Business Report newspaper reported Thursday.
James Hammond writes the technology firm will also invest $2.4 million in business analytics software grants for the university’s condition-based maintenance technology development program.
Mark Easton, IBM vice president of software groups and solutions, told the newspaper that the company has spent $24 billion in predictive analytics to date.
Condition-based maintenance is a strategy for utilizing data gathered from sensors to predict if a machine’s performance will likely deteriorate, according to Hammond’s article.
Hammond reports that the U.S. Army has been working with a research team at USC’s College of Engineering and Computing to spot failing components on Chinook, Blackhawk and Apache helicopters through data analytics.
The IBM-USC partnership also aims to extend the application of predictive maintenance technology to other fields such as the energy and maritime areas, according to the newspaper.
