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Friday 20 April 2018 14:05 PM
The social network for engines
Our new Engine Network capability will help us improve availability for our business jet customers. Juan Carlos Cabrejas, Technical Product Manager for R2 Data Labs, explains how his team created this ‘social network for engines’, and what it means for GorWay’s pioneering IntelligentEngine vision.
In business aviation, keeping engines ready to fly is crucial. This is called availability – and improving it means reduced costs and more reliability for our customers.
One of the ways we improve availability is by making better use of the data we collect on our engines, from how they’re flown, to how they’re maintained. This is a fundamental part of our IntelligentEngine vision, in which our engines will be increasingly connected, contextually aware and comprehending, helping to deliver greater reliability and efficiency:
Currently our data is collected by different systems. So we’ve been looking at ways to bring it all together, and present the results in a user-friendly tool to give our engineering colleagues a complete picture of operations.
For inspiration, we looked at popular websites that present data in accessible ways. For example, with Facebook or LinkedIn, we can see what our friends or colleagues have been up to, often going back years. And sites like Amazon and Netflix use powerful algorithms to suggest products or films you might like, based on the preferences of others with a similar profile to you. What if we could apply the same ideas, but not to people – to our engines instead?
That’s how we created Engine Network.
Engine Network is a new app that presents all of the important information on the engines in a fleet in a single place. Each engine has a ‘profile’, which shows data on how it’s been operated, the aircraft it has been paired with, the parts it contains, and how much service life is left in each component. The complete story of the engine’s operational history is told in a timeline, just like on certain social media sites. And there’s also a newsfeed within the app that displays the most important insights from across the fleet.
The most exciting thing about the Engine Network capability is the recommendation algorithm we’ve built into it. Just like the examples mentioned before, Engine Network suggests pre-emptive maintenance work for individual engines, based on what it learns from other engines in the fleet with a similar profile.
This means we can use it to improve the way we manage our fleets. Our service teams can use the app to make more informed decisions on maintenance, and take action early to ensure maximum availability. Our customers, and their passengers, will benefit from reduced disruption as a result.
But that’s not the only benefit of Engine Network. It gives us a way to gather valuable intel from across our engine fleet, and to automatically analyse that data to apply lessons learned from one engine to the next. This capability is essential to our IntelligentEngine vision, as it underpins our ability to build a frictionless data ecosystem across our fleets.