Gemsotec wins the hackathon “Predicting pump failures”
Leading up to the virtual conference and webinar series Asset Performance 4.0, BEMAS, the Belgian Maintenance Association, organized 3 virtual hackathons about hot topics in maintenance. The challenges were provided by Aquafin and Fluvius, who chose the winners on September 17th, 2020.
Out of 13 submissions, Danubius-Gemsotec, Element61, and Yazzoom – I-care were chosen as finalists of the hackathon “Predicting pump failures based on sensor data” by Aquafin. They presented their case on the Asset Performance 4.0 conference, on which Danubius-Gemsotec was crowned winner.
Two questions were asked during this hackathon: an algorithm for failure detection and how to visualize the priority of attention of some 2000 sites. We received in total 13 submissions: some were more detailed than others, some using a data science approach, others using more expert knowledge. As you can imagine, it was not easy for the jury to compare.
Evaluation
As a hackathon is some sort of contest, submissions were scored based on:
- relevance,
- simplicity and data presentation,
- openness of architecture and
- innovation and scalability.
For each of the categories we defined criteria which would define a top score, medium and lower score. In the end “relevance” and “openness of architecture” were the most decisive:
- Relevance relates to as how early one can detect a failing engine. A strict target is hard to define, though for hackathon, the target was set at minimum 12 hours to be relevant and anything above was a plus. In the end it was not feasible to compare the detection window for each individual event over all the submissions, so we evaluated Relevance based on the average time of detection prior to the failure in combination with the discussions in the submitted reports. The larger the detection window and the more promising the model accuracy, the higher Relevance was scored.
- Openness of architecture: each company uses a multitude of software programs. Hence, the proposed solution is not a standalone application: it communicates with other applications, such as our SCADA system for the inflow of measurement values. The more details given and the more open the used protocols or cloud stack is, the higher this was scored.
Congratulations to Danubius-Gemsotec
“When comparing the submissions, Danubius-Gemsotec received the highest overall score,” Kris De Gussem, at Aquafin, concludes. “Contributing to this are the clear representation of the results, the usage of the cloudstack Aquafin plans to use as well, and the insights given into the model accuracy and model execution time.”
Congratulations to Danubius-Gemsotec for winning this hackathon! We look forward to keep in touch with the winning solutions while we refine our use case.