INSIGHT / Case Study

Critical infrastructure has never been important in history than it is right now. As we experience and work through global pandemic, we still need shipyards and warehouses to keep supply chains running. We need data and network centers to keep communication lines open and we need power plants and refineries to keep the whole machine running.

Due to the vital importance of these sites, they have traditionally been staffed by professionals trained to manage operations, security, maintenance, and all other aspects of keeping the facility running. Over the years, however, we’ve learned that adding more humans does not necessarily guarantee operation. While humans excel in creative and abstract thoughts, they also bring a certain level of inconsistency and imperfection which can cause issues. For example, In the case of datacenters, more than 70% of all data center outages are caused by human error and not by a fault in the infrastructure design. Furthermore, “mistakes” that led to an outage can often be traced to a poor decision by senior management.

The obvious solution in overcoming human inconsistency and ensure constant operation of critical facilities is to automate tasks using the power of software. However, this is difficult to do using traditional software techniques of requirements documents, coding, bug fixing and version control. Injecting a traditional software development project into an already complex operation needlessly increases risk and is simply not feasible.

A highly feasible and proven solution is to use ‘Digital Workers’. Digital Workers are software entities, powered by artificial intelligence, which can be trained directly by subject matter experts. Digital Workers can execute work in a human-like manner, and do not take breaks, get sick, or execute inconsistently. Security experts can train Digital Workers to recognize authorized personnel and sound alarms for unauthorized events. Operations experts can train Digital Workers to monitor conditions via the Building Management System and take appropriate action if conditions stray outside of acceptable parameters.

Digital Workers are very beneficial, with their 24 x 7 dedicated focus, rule-based / AI driven correlation to identify true conditions (For Example: Physical threat versus high humidity / foggy conditions blocking camera view) to discern, decide and perform necessary steps / actions without needing any human intervention.

The typical scenarios/use cases involving Digital Workers for monitoring and maintenance include: