Amazon launches ML-powered maintenance tool Lookout for Equipment in general availability

Amazon today announced the general availability of Lookout for Equipment, a service that uses machine learning to help customers perform maintenance on equipment in their facilities. Launched in preview last year during Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2020, Lookout for Equipment ingests sensor data from a customer’s industrial equipment and then trains a model to predict early warning signs of machine failure or suboptimal performance.

Predictive maintenance technologies have been used for decades in jet engines and gas turbines, and companies like GE Digital’s Predix and Petasense offer Wi-Fi-enabled, cloud- and AI-driven sensors. According to a recent report by analysts at Markets and Markets, predictive factory maintenance could be worth $12.3 billion by 2025. Startups like Augury are vying for a slice of the segment, beyond Amazon.

With Lookout for Equipment, industrial customers can build a predictive maintenance solution for a single facility or multiple facilities. To get started, companies upload their sensor data — like pressure, flow rate, RPMs, temperature, and power — to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and provide the relevant S3 bucket location to Lookout for Equipment. The service will automatically sift through the data, look for patterns, and build a model that’s tailored to the customer’s operating environment. Lookout for Equipment will then use the model to analyze incoming sensor data and identify early warning signs of machine failure or malfunction.

For each alert, Lookout for Equipment will specify which sensors are indicating an issue and measure the magnitude of its impact on the detected event. For example, if Lookout for Equipment spotted an problem on a pump with 50 sensors, the service could show which five sensors indicate an issue on a specific motor and relate that issue to the motor power current and temperature.

“Many industrial and manufacturing companies have heavily invested in physical sensors and other technology with the aim of improving the maintenance of their equipment. But even with this gear in place, companies are not in a position to deploy machine learning models on top of the reams of data due to a lack of resources and the scarcity of data scientists,” VP of machine learning at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian said in a press release. “Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a new service that enables customers to benefit from custom machine learning models that are built for their specific environment to quickly and easily identify abnormal machine behavior — so that they can take action to avoid the impact and expense of equipment downtime.”

Lookout for Equipment is available via the AWS console as well through supporting partners in the AWS Partner Network. It launches today in US East (N. Virginia), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Seoul) server regions, with availability in additional regions in the coming months.

The launch of Lookout for Equipment follows the general availability of Lookout for Metrics,  a fully managed service that uses machine learning to monitor key factors impacting the health of enterprises. Both products are complemented by Amazon Monitron, an end-to-end equipment monitoring system to enable predictive maintenance with sensors, a gateway, an AWS cloud instance, and a mobile app.

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