Advanced Analytics to re-invent inspection services  

Every day, from the roof of a secure gas storage site or on an offshore platform in the middle of the North Sea, checking wind turbine blades or thousands of kilometers of roads, rails or power lines, Bureau Veritas experts are inspecting any kind of assets throughout the globe, supporting industries to control their risks and make the world safer.

Today, such industries are massively transformed with digital technologies, opening brand new possibilities.

Drones, robots, sensors, and digital twins – Towards a new level of industrial risk management

Digital transformation is a unique opportunity to redefine the way asset integrity and performance are managed, while improving the safety of inspectors on the field. The booming usage of drones has brought huge opportunities to Bureau Veritas services developments such as observing safely long distance assets as transmission networks. On the ground, or inside equipments, robots, such as crawlers, enable to perform repetitive observation tasks in dangerous or difficult environments.

Photogrammetry is another tool for Bureau Veritas inspectors, which allows computers to generate 3D images from standard photographs, creating a full digital twin of any kind of asset: Bureau Veritas, through partnerships with companies like Dassault Systems and Bentley is able to generate a geometrical model of an asset. It offers a single source of information to interface automatically with connected inspectors and survey and testing data, as well as live data from equipment sensors to provide a continually evolving model of the asset. It gives to the owners a 360° view of their assets via an easy-to-use dashboard.

Analytics, AI, predictive maintenance – Next generation of inspection services

Coupled with big data and artificial intelligence, digital twins and automated data collection pave the way for analytics-based inspection and targeted predictive maintenance. Working on data about operations and processes to date, intelligent algorithms will be able to recognize issues before they arise from the slightest of trends or the smallest anomalies in the parameters measured by on-site sensors, thanks to all the images collected which can be retrieved easily through online interfaces, together with the history of inspections. Then, equipments from the asset are identified automatically in the images thanks to image recognition techniques.

This kind of capability will take quality and risk management to a new level for asset owners. Rather than carrying out preventive maintenance as standard, for example, and often replacing components that are still fully functional, operators will be able to precisely target their maintenance while optimizing machine efficiency from minimal machine downtime.

Bureau Veritas has just signed a partnership with Avitas Systems, a GE Venture. Through the partnership, Bureau Veritas will advance its independent inspection services with the Avitas Systems cloud-based platform, combining automated data collection and artificial intelligence techniques

When safety and conformity meet performance and asset reliability

This kind of new technologies represents a genuine upgrade in the level of service, speed, and savings offered to customers in asset integrity management services. In addition, it is a quantum leap for health and safety of employees and inspectors, with broad societal benefits. Digitization will help Bureau Veritas to reduce the extent to which inspectors are exposed to high-risk environments or affected by repetitive work patterns. A fully-networked marine asset such as a tanker with a real-time digital twin, for instance, will ensure a more efficient physical inspection while providing more information about its current status and safety-critical parameters than ever before; and in the near future, drones will be able not just to provide inspection imaging, but actually carry out urgent repairs in dangerous locations and hostile conditions.

Thanks to this next generation of inspection services, Bureau Veritas revolutionizes the way industries monitor their assets. It makes its core mission of risk reduction and performance improvement a reality in the digitized world

Thanks to this next generation of inspection services, Bureau Veritas revolutionizes the way industries monitor their assets. It makes its core mission of risk reduction and performance improvement a reality in the digitized world.