Background 

Most asset-intensive organisations need to improve their data insights and capabilities.

Many have data siloed in both separate systems and separate business units and are seeking valuable insights from bringing disparate datasets together. 

Others may want to move maintenance practices from scheduled approaches to a condition-based or predictive strategy to reduce cost. 

Organisations will always want to improve revenue and /or safety by finding operational improvements informed by data insights.

Downer Professional Services' Neuroverse is designed to help asset-intensive organisations with a need to process large amounts of data, seeking to optimise their operations or improve the way they perform maintenance. 

It can ingest virtually any data from anywhere with an internet connection. From there it can perform real-time or batch analytics using the latest in streaming and distributed big data computing technologies to deliver performant advanced analytics at scale.

Clean and analysed data can be visualised using the built-in dashboarding tools, while end-users can experience those dashboards and other visuals (such as GIS maps) while on the move on their mobile devices. Users can also subscribe to notifications of events, so that they receive a text message or email when, for example and incident is predicted to occur.

For data analysts, the platform offers an expansive capability to analyse and experiment with data as part of investigations. While data scientists are free to use a wide range of common frameworks to train and manage models so that they don’t have a steep learning curve to adjust to the platform. 

Neuroverse’s capabilities include: 

• Providing the ability to ingest any data from any source at virtually any scale and velocity; 
• Processing data in near-real-time or via scheduled batch jobs; 
• Supporting any complexity of analysis, from simple aggregation and threshold checking, through to training custom machine learning models and employing them in production pipelines; 
• Ensuring data integrity so that consumers can trust the data; 
• Allowing data to be visualised so that end consumers can gain value from the insights; 
• Providing the ability to alert stakeholders to issues or key insights as they happen; 
• Ensuring all functionality is provided as self-service with fully featured tools for advanced data engineering and data science users as well as tools for non-technical end users to easily gain value from the collected and analysed data; 
• Providing a unified, robust, and manageable security solution across all features to ensure that users only gain access to what they need; and 
• Where possible, reduce complexity (particularly around infrastructure management) to ensure that users can focus on accomplishing their business goals. 

Results 

Multiple solutions have been built on Neuroverse, either through Downer’s implementation team working with the client to deliver an outcome, or by the client building their own solution using the self-service capabilities. Some organisations have used a hybrid of these two approaches. 

Significant projects include: 

BUMA  

Multi mine site implementation to collect data from all major mobile assets (haul trucks, excavators, dozers) as well as specific shovel data for the excavators from a third-party system. Downer was able to bring these datasets together in Neuroverse, providing alerting and reporting to enable improved operational awareness for supervisors so that they can account for issues mid-shift as they unfold, ultimately improving their service to their customer and driving more revenue.   

Downer Rail & Transit Systems 

Downer maintains several fleets of passenger trains in Australia. This solution was built to collect and analyse data from various systems, including the train operating system (which supplies over 30,000 signals per train), with a view to improving safety and moving to a predictive maintenance model. Neuroverse currently receives data for over a hundred passenger trains across Sydney, providing alerting for critical safety issues before they happen and informing on many maintenance scenarios as well. 

Downer Procurement 

Downer Procurement have used Neuroverse in a self-service manner to deliver analytics across their data (including analytics on behaviours across the Downer fleet). They receive support in the form of mentoring and review workshops to ensure that their work is as performant and cost effective as possible. The end results are business critical reports for the Downer executive team.