North Sea: EDSA to Deploy New Groundbreaking System to Offshore Oil Field

EDSA,the leading developer of power analytics solutions for the design, testing, and management of complex electrical power systems, today announced the successful completion of the Factory Acceptance Test for a groundbreaking new electrical power analytics, supervision and diagnostic system, scheduled to be deployed in a 40,700 barrel-per-day oil field in the North Sea. When deployed, it will be the first facility to deploy an autonomous power network using EDSA’s Paladin Live software in conjunction with Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) from Numenta Inc.

The project is being led by a multi-national engineering, procurement and installation team, lead by U.S. and British contractors, including Unitech Power Systems, EDSA’s software and engineering services representative in Western Europe. Upon completion, it will be the first commercial implementation of an intelligent, self-learning HTM system that is trained – not programmed – to aid early fault detection in the electrical power infrastructure supporting a large remote oil exploration facility.

The facility is a mini-city located nearly 200 miles from the nearest mainland, powered by a high voltage direct current (HVDC) power cable from the Norwegian mainland with on-board generators available for emergency and essential services. Because of the very high power outage costs, great care is taken to ensure the reliable operation of the platform’s electrical power network.

“The combination of EDSA’s power analytics and Numenta’s HTM technologies is the first of the coming generation of automated, self-learning systems for managing complex, enterprise-wide infrastructure, something so complex and so dynamic, that humans simply could not do it,” said Kevin Meagher, Chief Technology Officer of EDSA. “These technologies together offer unprecedented benefits for every organization with mission-critical power needs. We are extremely pleased with the synergies that have melded EDSA and Numenta into a strong and innovative partnership.

“Our work with EDSA is an exciting first step towards deploying HTM technology in one of the most demanding operational environments imaginable,” said Donna Dubinsky, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Board Chair of Numenta. “We look forward to continuing to work in this partnership to demonstrate the unique capabilities of HTM.”

The combined EDSA-Numenta solution helps to improve power system reliability in two ways:

EDSA’s Paladin Live serves as the “central nervous system” for the electrical power infrastructure, continually diagnosing the performance of each component of the system to check for telltale signs of potential operational problems or inefficiencies. By continually comparing readings back to the facility’s original Computer Aided Design (CAD) model, deviations from ideal performance specification are immediately identified, isolated, evaluated, and reported to facility staff.

Numenta’s HTM Technology performs the function of “anomaly detection.” It acts as the “brain” of the system, intelligently observing day-to-day operations to establish a baseline of normal functioning infrastructure; learning about the subtleties between “routine” and “non-routine” events; and finally alerting operators when a situation is not normal, enabling them to investigate.

In the future, the combined Paladin Live and HTM technology will be developed to have the ability to discover the root causes of operational concerns evident in sensory data and to predict forward in time.

[mappress]

Source: businesswire,April 20, 2010;