Industrial IoT applications (GE)

General Electric (GE) is a large, persified company with business units in energy, power, aviation, transportation, healthcare, finance, and other industries. Many of these business units deal in industrial machinery and devices such as wind turbines, aviation components, locomotive components, healthcare imaging machines, and so on. Such industrial devices continually generate high volumes of real-time data, and GE decided to provide advanced IoT analytics solutions to the thousands of customers using these devices and sensors across its various business units and industries.

The GE Predix platform enables users to develop and execute Industrial IoT applications to gain real-time insights about their devices and their usage, as well as take actions based on these insights. Certain services offered by Predix are powered by Apache Apex. GE selected Apex for these services based on the following features (feature details will be covered later in this book):

• High performance and distributed computing
• Dynamic partitioning
• Rich library of existing operators
• Support for at-least-once, at-most-once, and exactly-once processing
• Hadoop/YARN compatibility
• Fault tolerance and platform stability
• Ease of deployment and operability
• Enterprise grade security

One Predix service that runs on Apex is the Time Series service, which leverages Apex due to its speed, scalability, high performance, and fault tolerance capabilities.

The service provides:

• Efficient storage of time series data
• Data indexing for quick retrieval
• Industrial focused query modes
• High availability and horizontal scalability
• Millisecond data point precision

By running Apex, users of the Time Series service are able to:

• Ingest and analyze high-volume, high speed data from thousands of devices, sensors per customer in real-time without data loss
• Run predictive analytics to reduce costly maintenance and improve customer service
• Conduct unified monitoring of all connected sensors and devices to minimize disruptions
• Have fast application development cycles
• Meet changing business and application workloads due to Apex's high scalability

Another Predix service leveraging Apex is the Stream Processing service, which provides predefined flows to support data conversion, manipulation, or processing of large volumes of real-time data before delivering it to the event hub or storage layer. This service provides the following capabilities to users:

• Raw data ingestion
• Fault tolerance, allowing data to be processed despite machine or node failures
• Apex as the runtime engine (Spark and other engines will be supported in future releases)
• Multi-tenancy support
• Security (UAA integrated)

Apex's integration into the GE Predix platform and ability to be used across a broad spectrum of industrial devices and Industrial IOT use cases speaks volumes about Apex and its capabilities.

Additional Resources

• Video: GE presents Industrial IOT with Apache Apex - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmaSkXhHNu0
• Slides: GE presents Industrial IOT Time Series and Ingestion with Apache Apex - https://www.slideshare.net/secret/kqgcUZoDY5WNxj
• Video: An Overview of Predix, GE's Platform for the Industrial Internet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTKDDy8cHfg
• Website: GE Predix Developer Network - Stream Processing - https://www.predix.io/services/service.html?id=2229