AVEVA uses ML.NET to digitize industrial processes

AVEVA is a global leader in industrial software and connects people with trusted information and insights to drive responsible use of the world's resources. Over 90% of leading companies in twelve industrial sectors rely on AVEVA's solutions to help them deliver life's essentials: safety, reliable energy, food, infrastructure, transportation, and more.

AVEVA works with their customers and harnesses the power of their ecosystem to deliver solutions and expertise to optimize engineering, operations, and performance. From water and energy to food and infrastructure, their solutions transform opportunity into business value.

AVEVA makes extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their wide array of products across Engineering and Operations to maximize the value provided to their industrial customers. Their emphasis is on the digitalization of industrial processes where they leverage state-of-the-art AI capabilities to create digital twins of assets and processes for the benefit of their users. These AI capabilities are also utilized in combination (multiple types of AI) in order to provide the most advanced intelligence and software capabilities available in the industrial markets.

Business problem

AVEVA's solutions provide a rich ecosystem of data that can be utilized and harnessed to optimize, suggest, and create generative designs. Utilizing all that is offered with this data is crucial to AVEVA's vision of empowering people and industries to thrive. AVEVA's AI-based solutions give customers the agility to respond to changing conditions in real-time for greater safety, profitability, and sustainability.

AVEVA creates purpose-built AI solutions for their customers industry and application requirements, AVEVA's solutions integrate AI technology and machine-learning capabilities to enable a constant state of self-optimization through autonomous and semi-autonomous processes. With AVEVA's industrial AI solutions, customers can better detect current performance issues and better predict future ones, minimizing risk of failure of critical assets and maximizing operational performance.

AVEVA is always looking for opportunities to create cutting edge technology and has many patents supporting innovative artificial intelligent solutions. However, it isn't always possible to utilize AVEVA's customer data, whether that be due to geographical data residency or strict confidential material. Further, many of AVEVA's customers seek to create customizations to the products as they look to seek a further competitive advantage in their industry.

As a result, AVEVA was left with a situation where an application framework was required to support customer customizations as well as standard AI developments internally.

Why ML.NET?

The decision to choose ML.NET was an obvious choice given existing products developed by AVEVA already utilizing .NET solutions. In addition, the comprehensive documentation, ML.NET code samples, and product support provided by Microsoft allows AVEVA to quickly provide working solutions to customers.

With the power of AutoML and solutions provided by AVEVA, developers and customers can rapidly deploy regression, binary and multi classification machine learning solutions to their environments.

Impact of ML.NET

Building a framework supported by ML.NET not only allows AVEVA's developers to rapidly prototype machine learning solutions but additionally allows our customers to create industry leading customizations to their individual solutions.

In an industrial environment, having the ability to leverage machine learning techniques to drive sustainability, efficiency and profitability is key to AVEVA's and their customer's success.

With ML.NET, we have been able to accelerate our journey to suggestive design solutions utilizing the rapid prototyping and easy to use tools that ML.NET provides."

Solution architecture

Creating a machine learning framework on the ML.NET library does pose some technical complications, which AVEVA addressed in an innovative way.

Creating machine learning models is completed in the suggested way provided by Microsoft, either writing the code from scratch or utilizing powerful tools such as AutoML. When creating a framework to consume the machine learning models, AVEVA had to develop a solution to consume, interpret, and ultimately create a method of interacting with the model. All this needs to be completed seamlessly and with little input from the developer.

The result was a framework built to be accessed from the AVEVA proprietary development language AVEVA PML. AVEVA PML is a powerful UI customization language that allows developers to create and customers to customize. On top of this, the PML language has .NET access so creating .NET callable objects is seamless. This is where we see the interface with Microsoft's ML.NET come to life.

How it works

Whilst the ML.NET library is open source, AVEVA wanted to keep the ML.NET library as standard as possible allowing for seamless updates to the ML.NET library. To do this, they created a PMLNETCALLABLE object. This object consumes a trained ML.NET model, interprets the model for parameters (features of the model) and output (label of the model). With this information, an assembly is created automatically for the developer to consume and use in whatever method they wish.

Under the hood, this is accomplished with a combination of C# for consuming and understanding the machine learning model, followed by Intermediate Language to create the new assembly automatically. There are exceptions to what can be handled in this way but without the fantastic support of the Microsoft ML.NET development team, this wouldn't have been possible. Due to this great support, developers and customers alike have access to many machine learning methods out of the box.

The Future of AVEVA

AVEVA's vision is to use collaborative innovation to empower people and industries to thrive. With tools such as ML.NET as well as in house developed solutions, AVEVA can empower our customers and our people to use the latest techniques to thrive in the industries they participate in.

AVEVA is committed to creating enhanced suitability through digitization of industrial assets and utilizing AI to optimize and consume in the utmost efficient and sustainable way. AVEVA is proud to be one of the world's first companies in its sector to have its net-zero commitments validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).