Generate AI results with Falkonry AI Cloud and Litmus UNS

Phagun Baya
Apr 11, 2024

Key takeaways:

Information silos, vendor lock-ins, and complex solutions contribute to the underutilization of collected data, despite enterprises acknowledging its value and investing significantly in digital transformation.
Falkonry and Litmus have come together to enable swift data-driven decisions by integrating AI Cloud with UNS (Unified Namespace), putting IIoT data to work at scale.
This addresses key data fragmentation challenges in today's OT environment by centralizing operational data into a global UNS. The AI Cloud then leverages this now-accessible data to generate valuable insights.
The joint solution aligns manufacturers toward a future where driving strategic decisions based on AI insights without the need to do any labeling, data science, or software development, is a reality.

The world of industrial operations is evolving rapidly. With increasing data volumes, emerging technologies, and higher expectations, modern OT teams face both new challenges and opportunities to optimize existing processes. Despite significant investments in digital transformation, a staggering 80% of collected data goes unused and a significant percentage of the workforce falls short of desired digital transformation outcomes. To solve this, Falkonry and Litmus have come together to help you and your team get what matters to you most – data-driven smart decisions.

In a previous blog we explored how Falkonry and Litmus can help you overcome connectivity challenges so that you can put your operational data to work at scale. Through this blog, we are excited to share that we have further simplified your journey from data to actions by making our offering UNS-ready. Together, Falkonry + Litmus can now help you build your UNS and effortlessly bring data and contextual information into our Time Series AI Cloud to generate meaningful AI insights.

Before diving into the intricacies of its operation, what it solves, and its benefits, let’s cover the basics first…

What is Litmus UNS and how does it work with Falkonry?

Litmus UNS, a global UNS platform tackles challenges related to hard-to-access operational data across all layers of a business and contextualizes it for interoperability. It acts as your central messaging broker, enabling effortless data exchange via the widely adopted MQTT protocol. You can publish telemetry and automation data from various OT systems from across all layers of your business, and subscribe to it from IT applications, breaking down information silos and streamlining operations. What’s crucial here is Litmus’s ability to capture real-time data over MQTT as topics from industrial systems in the ISA-95 hierarchy including IoT gateways, PLCs, Historians, SCADA, and MES systems.

Falkonry Time Series AI Cloud, on the other hand, organizes, stores and continuously analyzes this data in real-time to generate AI insights. Falkonry makes the AI-generated insights more meaningful by leveraging the contextualized information present in the UNS. Together, this open, integrated, and intelligent solution provides a versatile foundation for your digital journey and helps your teams make data-driven decisions quicker than ever.

What are we solving?

Data inconsistency and fragmented data landscapes are major challenges in today’s heterogeneous OT environments. Though we all know the potential that data holds, a significant hurdle in digital transformation has long been the complex IT groundwork required to establish seamless data connectivity between physical systems and analytics applications. The challenges that hinder the realization of true operational potential include setting up a dataOps platform that can provide data standardization, organization, contextualization, governance, compliance and interoperability. Put simply, it takes too long and requires too much work to get data out of the OT network and then put it to work. Most current cloud-based IIoT offerings involve the complexity of deploying over half a dozen services that in turn demand an upfront development cost and significant operations effort before you can even get started with AI.

Therefore, what’s needed is a system that is open, secure, intelligent, and flexible, which is capable of bridging the age-old IT and OT divide. That’s where Falkonry + Litmus comes in. This innovative collaboration seamlessly combines Falkonry Time Series AI Cloud with Litmus UNS, providing a Unified Smart Architecture to build on.

This Unified Smart Architecture offers robust dataOps and AI capabilities transforming your data into a usable asset. While you can manage the data and the contextual information within UNS, both are also readily available to the AI Cloud to generate insights. This joint solution aligns you towards a future where driving strategic decisions based on AI insights is a reality; all without the need for any coding or burdening your IT teams.

How to connect Falkonry AI Cloud with Litmus UNS?

Step 1: Creating an account in Litmus UNS

For the Falkonry AI Cloud to connect to Litmus UNS, the first step is to create an account in Litmus UNS. This generates credentials for Falkonry AI Cloud to connect to UNS.

Step 2: Configuring data access between UNS and AI Cloud

Create a rule for the account created in the previous step, allowing data flow from specific or all assets to AI Cloud. Configure the MQTT topics for the assets you want to connect to the AI Cloud.

Step 3: Connecting Falkonry AI Cloud to Litmus UNS

After an account is configured, create a connection in the AI Cloud using the credentials generated in step 1.
The AI Cloud automatically connects to the UNS to start receiving data over a secure MQTT subscription.
Each MQTT topic produces a time series which is referred to in Falkonry as a signal. As data starts to flow from Litmus UNS to the AI Cloud, the signals contained in the data are discovered and become available for instant use. Both categorical and numeric data can be used in the AI Cloud.
The signals are immediately stored and made available for review and visualization. To make it easy to locate and work with thousands of signals, the signals can be organized by asset hierarchy present as UNS structure in Litmus UNS.

Step 4: Putting the data to work with Falkonry AI

The AI Cloud automatically analyzes the IIoT data in real-time and detects anomalies on all the signals that have accumulated enough data. There is no need to set up thresholds, anomaly detection or to label the data.
Falkonry makes it easy to see anomalies in the context of the UNS structure. You can even contextualize these anomalies against reference data to know why anomalies may be happening.

Benefits of Unified Smart Architecture

✅ Unified and Open

Utilize contextual insights from diverse industrial data sources, leveraging open technologies for scalable smart manufacturing.

✅ MQTT-friendly and UNS-ready

Directly subscribe to MQTT brokers like Litmus UNS, opening up opportunities for joint analysis. Leverage UNS to consume data from across all layers of your business.

✅ Vendor-agnostic data access

Data in the form of parquet files lets you readily recreate the state for any part of your namespace at any given point in time without vendor lock-in.

✅ No code AI at scale

Freedom from data prep, data labeling, data management costs, ML Ops and data science development

✅ Automated Anomaly Detection

Avoid downtime and performance issues by automatically detecting precursor events.

✅ Flexible Visualization

Visualize and compare data from any time period, providing a flexible and comprehensive analytical view.

✅ Real-time Tracking

Data flows are continuously tracked for network interruptions and logical disruptions such as name or channel changes.

✅ Automated analysis

Automatically initiates anomaly detection upon data transfer, optimizing operations without manual intervention.

✅ Live Monitoring of Actionable Events

The severe and persistent anomalies discovered by Falkonry are tracked as actionable events for live monitoring of the assets.

What more can you do with the data?

Using the Falkonry Time Series AI Cloud, you can understand the root causes of anomalies, alert staff about important anomalies, and recognize patterns to identify specific behaviors. You can even access AI results and the signal data via ReST APIs, leading to several imaginative applications in areas such as safety, emissions, quality and work optimization.

This unique combination of Limus and Falkonry provides your team with a Unified Smart Architecture, accelerating your journey to leveraging data and AI. With our commitment to a unified open architecture, free from coding and data labeling, we’re continuously enhancing interoperability and enriching AI insights. This is crucial in helping your teams implement condition-based actions to prevent downtime and performance issues. If you would like to get a glimpse of how Falkonry can trigger downstream actions and workflows based on such AI insights, watch our product walkthrough for Falkonry Rules. And to unlock the full potential of your IIoT data with minimal effort, sign up here to take our joint offering for a spin.