Hitachi America R&D is engaged in research activities that leverage big data analytics, internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and other technologies. These activities are designed to provide the foundation for new solutions that help organizations optimize operations, improve productivity and efficiency and solve unique challenges. Our research is focused on four key areas: asset lifecycle management, optimized manufacturing, predictive maintenance and finance.
At Hitachi America, our R&D team is expanding the boundaries of operational excellence through new technologies and solutions that drive new levels of operational efficiency and environmental sustainability.
- Asset Lifecycle Management
- Optimized Factory
- Fleet Management
- Finance
- Energy
- Additional Solutions
- Technologies behind the Solutions
Reinventing Asset Lifecycle Management
Many organizations are moving from full asset ownership to asset rental or as-a-service business models. Asset-intensive industries like oil and gas, energy and transportation are moving away from equipment-centric solutions to increase their efficiency and productivity, and to stay competitive.
The Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) has developed an asset lifecycle management solution that is available as a service to help organizations make this transformation. The solution integrates operations, portfolio management and services to provide complete end-to-end asset lifecycle management, from acquisition to decommissioning. Our innovative, artificial intelligence – enabled solution optimizes operations, maintenance and repair. It also includes analytics to help organizations improve the dependability of their systems and adapt to shifting industry objectives.
Our solution addresses three major asset management challenges:
- Operational inefficiencies caused by a heterogenous mix of assets and large information silos
- Increasing maintenance costs for aging assets installed over wide territories and in remote areas
- Regulatory pressures around safety, security and sustainability
Working with a major natural gas compression services provider, Hitachi implemented an integrated asset lifecycle management proof of concept to monitor and analyze fleets of remote compressor skids. Further research led to the development of a new class of key performance indicators (KPIs) for the provider. The new KPIs govern an integrated view of interaction between equipment, processes and service technicians and will help asset-intensive industries reinvent how they do business.
Hitachi America R&D is working across industries to provide solutions that help customers move from equipment-centric objectives to a modern, integrated asset lifecycle management strategy.
Optimized Factory
Standalone data is of little or no value. But great value can be found by connecting and contextualizing data to gain insights and inform decision-making. To compete globally, today’s manufacturers need the real-time production and quality insights that can only come from a connected factory. They need a system that provides not just insight into what’s happening on the factory floor, but a complete view of operations and business processes such as sales and logistics. By aggregating and analyzing data for actionable insights, manufacturers can improve operational efficiency, on-time delivery rates, product quality and manufacturing flexibility.
Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) developed the Hitachi Optimized Factory to bring unfettered data access to the industry. This extensive suite of smart solutions helps manufacturers aggregate data from operational technology (OT), IT and the internet of things (IoT) to enable timely decision-making and control across the factory. With Hitachi Optimized Factory, manufacturers have a solution that uses predictive analytics and machine learning in production operations to reach new levels of efficiency.
The Hitachi Optimized Factory suite includes:
- Shop floor visualization for live monitoring of production-line operations (using production data and inference sensing solutions) and real-time detection of adverse events.
- Shop floor traceability for end-to-end traceability and tracking of raw materials and work-in-progress (WIP) parts, as well as real-time analysis of operations such as schedule adherence and production scheduler and operator efficiency.
- Live condition monitoring to monitor industrial assets by connecting OT asset characteristics, sensing and data extraction parameters, network constraints and machine learning model requirements. Using a sensor fusion approach, acoustic, vibration, camera and programmable logic controller (PLC) data is combined to model equipment behavior and detect impending failures.
- Interactive robotics and multimodal control of robotic arms using both speech and gesture recognition through motion sensors and video analytics.
- Digital twin representation of shop-floor processes to simulate feasibility and scalability testing for any new manufacturing solution and to simulate what-if scenarios.
Our Optimized Factory analytics capabilities take manufacturers beyond monitoring and visualization, providing actionable insights, predictions and recommendations that truly optimize the manufacturing process:
- Operator performance analytics based on operation sensing data allows manufacturers to classify operator skill level for transferring the operational know-how of skilled workers to trainees.
- Early defect detection based on data from the assembly process and final inspections is used to predict defective products that may be in process, reducing the number of defects and the related costs.
- Dynamic scheduling based on production simulation and a data-driven, self-learning simulation model optimizes production scheduling while adapting to product or process variations, demand fluctuations and sudden events such as express orders.
Working with industrial manufacturers across industries, we develop and deploy smart quality control and defect rate reduction solutions to improve product and manufacturing quality. We use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to make recommendations for production and quality. Our solutions analyze production data and model a relationship between key performance indicators (KPIs) and the 4M (men, machines, materials and methods) approach.
With decades of leadership in both IT and OT, Hitachi has the expertise to help manufacturers harness the true potential of their data. At Hitachi America R&D, we tap cutting-edge technologies like machine learning, analytics and AI to help manufacturers modernize. Our solutions help manufacturers across industries – and around the world – achieve continuous improvement and optimal end-to-end production that will ultimately benefit everyone.
Next Generation Fleet Management
A well-managed fleet responds quickly to any demand. But as fleets grow and demands become more complex, fleets are under increasing pressure to perform faster and better, with less. Fleet management organizations need to streamline day-to-day operations, reduce unexpected downtime, minimize repair time, eliminate repair mistakes and improve the customer and operator experience. And they need to do all this while dealing with a shortage of skilled labor. To keep up, they need new tools that can help them scale up and speed up without reducing quality of service.
Many industries are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve all aspects of their business operations – and fleet management organizations can do the same. With AI-driven fleet management from the Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) , companies can transform their fleet operations to meet these new demands. Our solution helps organizations eliminate silos across critical areas of fleet operations, from planning to monitoring and maintenance, to keep the fleet tuned up and on the road.
Hitachi AI-driven fleet management can improve overall day-to-day operations by enabling
- Real-time fleet optimization
- Faster, targeted repairs
- Optimized equipment usage, logistics and safety
Hitachi’s AI-driven fleet management gives companies a revolutionary new solution to the fundamental challenges that fleets face by optimizing maintenance operations, speeding repairs and integrating operations. The AI-based recommendations empower decision-makers with accurate and timely information. With Hitachi fleet management, skilled workers can access the information and recommendations they need for action, maximizing their productivity.
Hitachi America R&D is working across industries to help fleet management organizations integrate AI and adopt a modern approach to fleet management. Our solution empowers human decision-making and enables fleet drivers, operations and service managers, and mechanics to make better decisions and keep their fleets in the fast lane.
A Financial Solution That Promotes Digital Trust
Trust is based on integrity – especially in financial operations. And blockchain technology is one of the best solutions ever invented for data integrity. Organizations worldwide rely on it to ensure the secure and compliant management of their business processes and data. Recognizing its potential, Hitachi started researching blockchain technologies in the early 2000s.
Regulated industries like financial services, corporate finance, and the pharmaceutical and medical industries are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the integrity of their data. They must prove – and document – that their data is handled appropriately and securely, and that their systems cannot be compromised or bypassed. To achieve those objectives, organizations must modernize their systems and take advantage of innovative technologies, such as blockchain, that ensure data security.
Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) is developing new ways to secure and control business processes and data using private Hyperledger blockchain systems. We work with enterprises to innovate new solutions for managing data governance that are simpler to manage and that deliver a high degree of integrity. With our co-created Hyperledger blockchain solutions, users can trust that their data – human-generated or IoT-generated – is handled following a defined process and is unaltered.
Hitachi America R&D works across industries to help companies benefit from this new approach to data management and integrity. Innovative solutions such as these are transforming data governance and enabling financial operations to achieve a new level of digital trust.
Smarter Data Solutions to Meet Energy Demands
When industries transform, opportunities emerge. That’s certainly true in the energy industry, where rapid digitalization, the shift to renewable energy and the rise of self-generating communities are disrupting the grid, rapidly reshaping the industry — and creating opportunities for innovation.
In the midst of this transformation — when the need for fast, accurate business intelligence is greatest — organizations are struggling to regain control over their data. Many utilities, vendors and end users are overwhelmed by the amount and variety of their data, which is often spread across silos, with incompatible data protocols and no way to perform the advanced analytics necessary for growth and competitive differentiation.
The Hitachi America R&D’s Energy Solutions team focuses on solving these challenges and bringing fast, accurate data collection, management and analytics to the energy industry. Our approach is based on customer-focused innovation and centers on these key areas:
- Internet of things (IoT) data solutions for energy equipment, i.e. inverters and power equipment
- Advanced data analytics on:
- Renewable forecasting
- Energy storage operation for multiple revenue streams
- Distribution resource planning and operation
- Distribution energy resource modeling and simulation
Hitachi Energy Resource Optimization Suites are designed to be open workspaces with a rich selection of energy applications for diversified user groups who own or operate DERs. These high-end software suites feature state-of-the-art visualization technologies with advanced grid modeling, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) analytics. They provide end-to-end solutions for online and offline applications, including edge computing and IoT data ingestion and management. Applications are all web-based and can be available on customer premises or in the cloud. With these innovative solutions, our customers are empowered to plan for distribution resources, monitor generation or consumption in real time, and optimally control their DERs.
By helping customers make sense of their data – and draw more value from it – Hitachi America R&D Energy Solutions is solving fundamental business challenges in the power and energy sector and developing solutions that will drive a better, more sustainable future for the energy industry and the world.
Additional Solutions
Once a futuristic dream, autonomous driving is now a reality that is rapidly reshaping the transportation industry. At the forefront of this evolution is Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D), which is developing world-leading autonomous mobility technologies to make travel safer, more efficient and comfortable, and less expensive.
Hitachi America R&D has expertise in the entire mobility ecosystem, including the power sector, traffic infrastructure, transportation and smart cities. Our broad experience gives us unique insights into business and consumer needs — and the expertise to eventually develop a single platform for autonomous mobility based on an automated cooperative infrastructure.
In the automotive sector, we are working with Hitachi partners and leading manufacturers worldwide to develop innovative solutions, including sensor fusion and vehicle control algorithms, advanced electronic control unit (ECU), occupant monitoring systems, and more. In addition, we are working on vehicle maintenance, operations and performance, which has already led to delivery of numerous mobility solutions across three categories:
- Descriptive analytics to monitor performance and better understand driver behavior
- Predictive analytics to estimate and forecast vehicle failures, driver performance, fleet demands and more
- Prescriptive analytics to reduce failure cost, optimize maintenance and make smart recommendations that lower costs and boost performance
Through these efforts and more, Hitachi America R&D is ensuring that autonomous mobility solves both societal and business challenges — and does so as safely and efficiently as possible.
Change is coming to industrial operations, but current transformation approaches often lack a technology backbone that systematically addresses value chain requirements. To be successful, an organization’s transformation must eliminate silos and disconnects in IT and operational technology (OT) systems, which leave them without a single source of truth. In addition to eliminating silos, organizations must also find a way to address manual processes and workflows, a lack of access to external demand and supply signals, and susceptibility to market and technology disruptions.
To overcome these challenges, Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) has developed solutions for both operations’ optimization and supply chain optimization.
Operations Optimization
Hitachi America R&D operations optimization solution suite addresses operations use cases across several verticals. To develop this suite, we abstracted problems in operations across different domains and solved them by using a combination of machine learning and simulations. After the organization has gathered its observations – that is, its data, the solutions target three tasks.
- Interpret the current status of its operations.
- Predict the future status of its systems and operations.
- Optimize operations so that its systems become more efficient.
The solution includes three components, each of which corresponds to one of the tasks.
- Descriptive insights allow the organization to determine the current status of its operations. Solutions include Operations Monitoring and Operator Performance Analytics.
- Predictive information provides a look at the future status of the organization’s systems and operations. Solutions include Activity Time Prediction, Production KPI Prediction and Demand Forecasting.
- Prescriptive recommendations allow the organization to optimize its operations to drive efficiency. Solutions include Process Failure Rate Reduction, Resource Scheduling and Dynamic Dispatch.
Hitachi America R&D operations optimization solution suite has been implemented in a variety of verticals, including mining, discrete manufacturing and continuous manufacturing.
Supply Chain Optimization
Hitachi America R&D’s supply chain optimization strategy helps organizations optimize their supply chains to generate more value. Our two-step approach ensures success by taking advantage of cutting-edge technology:
- We apply digitalization for a strategic technology overhaul that optimizes cost of operations and enables new services by automating manual operations across the value chain.
- We then further digitalize to extend value-added services into the portfolio and create new value for the enterprise.
Our supply chain optimization strategy helps companies improve their customers’ experience and transform the businesses they work with into true partners. Integrating digitalization in supply chains in this manner prepares companies for the future.
Avoid unexpected equipment downtime and the related costs. Companies across industries are using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics to predict equipment failures before they happen, so they can take preventive action. Companies that make use of predictive maintenance can avoid unexpected failures, decrease maintenance costs and increase equipment availability to achieve operational excellence.
Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) has developed a solution suite to address maintenance and repair use cases across several industries. We work with our customers to understand their requirements. Then together we develop data-driven technologies that enable their workers to apply the right maintenance actions at the right time.
Our solutions employ AI and machine learning technology and combine them with historical event and sensor data to:
- Monitor equipment health and performance and detect any faults in the equipment or any of its components
- Predict future failures and end-of-life events and estimate the impact of potential failures
- Guide technicians on how to repair equipment, recommend the right maintenance action and optimize equipment operating conditions
- Evaluate the effectiveness of maintenance actions and analyze the root causes of failures
Hitachi predictive maintenance solutions are helping companies across industries, including manufacturing, transportation and automotive, infrastructure management, oil and gas, mining and healthcare. In addition to reducing expenses and downtime, predictive maintenance can help make the world a safer place by preventing equipment failures that can create dangerous situations.
Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) works with companies around the world to implement predictive maintenance programs that will help them reduce costs while improving efficiency, safety and quality.
From concept to production, your design is foundational to success. Businesses must be creative if they want to succeed and grow. Hitachi’s human-centric design approach is an effective way for organizations to tap into this creativity across industries. Companies can improve their ability to identify opportunities, define and scope objectives, innovate new solutions and validate their values while addressing a broad range of business challenges.
The Hitachi Global Center for Social Innovation–North America (CSI-NA) uses design approach that includes facilitated workshops, field research, visualization, concept evaluation and more in its customer projects.
The Hitachi’s design approach includes four workshops:
- Foresight Workshops help clients re-evaluate their business direction and analyze societal, technological, economic and political trends. These workshops consider how society might change in the next 10 to 15 years and spur organizations to rethink their business direction based on this renewed perspective.
- Organizational Alignment Workshops define goals and align participants around the same goal. These workshops help organizations identify shared objectives, define the mission statement as a team, identify and prioritize common challenges, and devise possible actions to overcome those challenges.
- Context Mapping Workshops identify opportunity areas. Participants identify stakeholders and the resources and values exchanged between them, allowing teams to establish a deeper understanding of the solution space. As a result, they can identify potential business opportunities or areas where they lack needed details, presenting opportunities for further investigation and field research.
- Solution Ideation Workshops generate solution ideas and action plans. By empathizing and re-imagining target stakeholder challenges, participants redefine who they aim to create value for, what the value should be, and how the value should be delivered. Tools used may include personas, Business Model Canvas, journey maps, results from research and other workshops.
Hitachi’s design workshops help companies discover opportunities and hypothesize solutions and the potential value those solutions can generate. The workshops iterate through discovering, hypothesizing, prototyping, evaluating, and refining phases to ensure that the resulting innovation generates the intended value. Hitachi’s design approach helps companies master innovation and create solutions that deliver value to customers around the world.
Technologies behind the Solutions
At Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D), we recognize that the Internet of Things (IoT) edge is critical to every industrial IoT solution. That’s why we are developing innovative IoT edge, core analytics and platform solutions. We leverage our decades of experience in IT, operational technology (OT), and products and systems to discover new answers to society’s challenges. Our collaborative, multidisciplinary teams create solutions with our customers and for our customers.
At Hitachi America R&D, we focus on innovation and innovative solutions. Our talent set is unmatched. In addition, the Hitachi group companies have a worldwide reach. We can tap into those global resources whenever needed. And the Hitachi Global Insights Lab brings together a team of researchers and designers from around the world to support technology innovation in several research centers. Together, we are innovating to create advanced solutions that will benefit the world.
IoT Edge Solutions
Focusing on all major aspects of the IoT edge, our solutions are tailored to solve industrial IoT problems and have been deployed in real-world use cases in manufacturing, transportation and other sectors. These solutions feature:
- Scalable and modular architecture: Our multitiered, remotely managed edge architecture accommodates use cases with single or multiple edge nodes. The loosely coupled architecture adds flexibility to the system to allow for location-agnostic services such as data storage, compute and visualization.
- Distributed analytics orchestration: Microservices-based architecture allows seamless distribution of analytics anywhere across the IoT fabric, from sensors to edge to cloud.
- Ubiquitous connectivity: Our solutions support multiple industrial connectivity protocols, and our advanced connectivity solutions provide noninvasive data extraction from digital displays.
- Flow management: We offer structured and unstructured data flow management and data lake storage in a common format, based on compute, network and application constraints.
- Inference sensing: Solutions based on sensor fusion (such as acoustic/vibration/camera/OT data) render edge analytics solutions in real time.
- Security: Sensing-layer security analyzes the behavior of all data sources and alerts stakeholders when potential security breaches are detected.
IoT Edge/Core Analytics
Deploying solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) presents challenges, such as managing data collection and building and deploying models from edge to core. To address these, Hitachi America R&D has built an architecture for flexible deployment of analytical solutions in the cloud or on edge servers. The architecture uses docker images that can be deployed entirely on cloud virtual machines, entirely on edge servers or in a hybrid model with images on both.
IT Platform
Hitachi’s IT platform is fundamental to integrating IT with OT. We integrate AI/analytics and IoT/edge technologies on the IT platform to uncover unprecedented insights. The IT platform is high-performance, agile, flexible and reliable, with integrity from edge to core configured through hybrid cloud solutions. Application developers can leverage Hitachi AI/analytics and edge solutions to focus on development, while cloud operators can focus on maintaining their services nonstop without increasing operating cost.
Hitachi America R&D continues to work on collaborative creation with customers to understand their challenges, validate ideas and create solutions that overcome both business and social challenges.
Industrial AI is the application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML) to address the opportunities and challenges presented in Industry 4.0. This is an important area of research that is gaining prominence due to the ever-increasing number of connected equipment and corporations trying to utilize the latest technologies to enhance their industrial operations.
At Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D), we have developed several AI based methods for the following areas:
- Maintenance and Repair Analytics: This includes performance monitoring, remaining useful life estimation, failure prediction, and maintenance recommendations.
- Operation Optimization: This includes operation monitoring, operator profiling, activity time prediction, and scheduling recommendation.
- Quality Enhancement: This includes quality monitoring, batch quality prediction, and operating envelop recommendation
We have successfully applied many of our research results to a wide array of verticals such as manufacturing, mining, mobility, energy and healthcare.
Besides investigating the use of AI&ML to real world use cases, we are also investigating several fundamental research topics, such as new deep learning architectures for machine sensor data, knowledge extraction from industrial corpus, use of deep reinforcement learning for industrial applications, hybrid modeling of industrial equipment and processes, decision making under uncertainty. The ultimate goal of this research is to achieve an end-to-end optimization and automation of industrial operations. Hitachi America R&D is emerging as a leader in Industrial AI with a track record of patent applications, contributions to the research community and the completion of successful real-world applications. Come join us as we revolutionize Industry 4.0.
A thorough understanding of the manufacturing process is key to keeping production quality up and costs down. That’s why today’s manufacturers are turning to end-to-end value chain solutions to improve and modernize product design, prototyping, manufacturing, and maintenance, repair and update (MRU) capabilities.
The Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) is tapping into Hitachi’s extensive IT and operational technology (OT) experience to co-create value chain solutions with our customers. Our end-to-end manufacturing value chain solutions focus on rapid prototyping, smart manufacturing and MRU development. The solutions apply advanced technology to address the dynamic changes affecting manufacturing industries globally.
Our solutions include:
- Rapid prototyping: Hitachi helps customers achieve the best design and prototyping solutions. We use advanced computational tools; our profound knowledge of materials, process, property and performance from static to dynamic; and field-proven experience in virtual manufacturing to accelerate design and production. Our prototyping solutions use the latest augmented reality/virtual reality and three-dimensional printing (3DP)/additive manufacturing technology to streamline the prototyping process and keep costs down.
- Production process innovation: We have developed and implemented innovative new technologies to support production. Our solutions include basic incoming raw material analysis, failure root cause analysis and manufacturing process innovation. For example, some of our process innovations include digital casting, high-speed precision machining, cutting-edge fluid spray technology for machining, high-accuracy bending and forming, and high-speed fusion and solid-state welding. Product quality is assured with destructive and non-destructive testing and inspection, and intelligent production traceability systems help optimize the supply chain.
- On-demand MRU: We combine physics-based component degradation and failure models with component and structure sensing and monitoring solutions to provide on-demand maintenance and repair. And the utilization of 3DP/additive manufacturing technology enables on-site repair and upgrades.
- Co-simulation design testing: Hitachi has developed SimXpand (a registered trademark of Hitachi America, Ltd.), the first co-simulation platform developed to test large-scale, complex, system-level designs across industries. SimXpand applies innovative process automation and high-performance computing cloud technology to ease and speed the coordinated use of multiple, heterogeneous simulation applications. The platform requires fewer manual inputs from users, which dramatically elevates the design team’s ability to tangibly and materially drive value for the business.
Hitachi America R&D has 30 years of proven experience in product design, development, manufacturing process technology advancement and production-line problem-solving with industrial organizations. Our end-to-end manufacturing value chain solutions help manufacturers optimize processes, save money, and improve the value and quality of their products, to the benefit of all.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are emerging as the leading solution for securing and certifying business data. DLTs, also referred to as blockchain systems, are based on Hyperledger and similar platforms and are generally regarded as immutable. But their data can be manipulated if someone can access all of the system’s nodes, or servers.
Hitachi America Research and Development Division (R&D) has developed a blockchain-based notary system to address that loophole and ensure digital trust. The Hitachi solution manages a blockchain system shared among companies and organizations that have a private ledger that requires independent verification. To ensure privacy of business data, only the Merkle proofs (the mathematically hashed proofs of the data) are stored in the notary service. When data needs to be verified, it is first confirmed against the original system to determine the Merkle proof output, which is then confirmed by Hitachi’s notary system.
Hitachi America R&D is a leader in blockchain technologies and conducts continuous research to make the technology practical for everyday business use cases. Going forward, such solutions will provide a totally secure and private way for companies to certify their business data and ensure a more digitally secure future for all.
