VIDEO: DNV GL unlocks maritime potential of big data

FEBRUARY 9, 2017 — DNV GL is launching a new marine industry data platform – “Veracity” – to help the industry improve its profitability and explore new business models through digitalization.

“The potential for using data more smartly in our industries is enormous,” says Remi Eriksen, President and CEO of DNV GL. “Companies have always turned to us for independent, expert assessments and best practices – to build trust in the safety, efficiency and sustainability of their physical assets or operations. Now, we are exercising this same role in the digital domain with our Veracity industry data platform, designed to help companies leverage the ever-increasing amount of data. We are not looking to own data, but rather to unlock, qualify, combine and prepare data for analytics and benchmarking.”

DNV GL is developing the platform by working together with several industry leaders on big data projects in pursuit of reduced downtime, improved safety, predictive maintenance, performance forecasting, energy efficiency and real-time risk management.

The Veracity industry data platform is designed to help companies improve data quality and manage the ownership, security, sharing and use of data. By creating frictionless connections between data owners and users, says DNV GL, the platform will create new opportunities for improving ship performance and safety, while at the same time reducing operational costs.

“As a classification society it is vital for us to always be exploring ways we can help our industry to leverage new technologies to improve the safety and productivity of their assets,” said Knut Ørbeck-Nilssen, CEO DNV GL – Maritime. “Today that means being out in front of digitalization and the vast amount of data being produced and gathered on vessels by advanced sensor technology and interconnected systems. Our industry data platform Veracity will enable connections between multiple stakeholders and data sets, thereby creating new and innovative solutions. This will give us a platform where our customers can integrate their data, quality assure the data, secure it, and offer controlled access to DNV GL or other providers to run analytics on the data. Individual data sets can be enriched with other, industry wide data sets, providing benchmarks, new and richer insights and analytics.”

One area where the maritime industry can benefit from the Veracity data platform could be allowing DNV GL’s maritime customers to document compliance of main onboard machinery and systems through predictive analytics, removing the need for calendar based inspections. In one of DNV GL’s first pilot projects a drilling operator embarked on a project to explore predictive analytics with a components vendor and an analytics services company.

Working with DNV GL to see if this approach could gain class approval, an analysis of the data revealed severe quality issues that none of the partners were previously aware of. Once the data was quality assured, machine learning algorithms could be applied to the data with success.

DNV GL says that the project demonstrated the need for continuous data management and quality assurance to reap the benefits of a data driven approach.

DNV GL notes that it has more than 150 years of experience in being a trusted custodian of customers’ asset and performance data. It says that Veracity, which being built in collaboration with Microsoft Azure and other leading companies, is bringing this role forward in the digitalization of the industries DNV GL serves.