Enterprise AI for Predicting HVAC Chiller Failures

Challenge

The building systems division of a Fortune 500 manufacturer provides equipment and services that provides comfort to customers while optimizing building energy expenditures. Historically, the building systems conducted chiller maintenance reactively which led to business disruptions and downtimes and costly emergency repair that ultimately impacted customer satisfaction. The manufacturer needed a reliability solution that rapidly integrated all relevant equipment and facility data sources and allow it to reduce downtime and costly, unscheduled maintenance for its commercial Heating, Venting & Cooling (HVAC) chiller systems.

Approach

The manufacturer deployed C3 AI Reliability for 165 of its chillers to address these objectives. The customer selected C3 AI for its proven ability to rapidly integrate sensor data, normalize and cluster disparate readings, and run machine learning algorithms to identify deteriorating conditions before failures occur.

In 4 days, C3 AI and the customer loaded, normalized, and mapped 3 years of sensor data for all 165 chillers, created custom analytics on these data, and configured a machine learning algorithm to predict chiller failure events. C3 AI Reliability exceeded the identified accuracy and precision targets.

About the Company

• Global equipment manufacturer and services company
• 100,000 employees
• $30 billion in revenue

Project Objectives

• Load and cluster sensor data for use in a predictive model
• Train a machine learning model to predict chiller failure
• Demonstrate speed of development and deployment by completing project in < 1 week

Project Highlights

• Configured C3 AI Reliability in 4 days
• Loaded 3 years of sensor data for 165 HVAC chillers (40-50 sensor feeds per chiller)
• Developed 163 analytics as inputs for failure prediction algorithm
• Trained and tuned a machine learning model to predict chiller failures with 73% precision and 71% recall

The C3 AI Platform provides the necessary comprehensive capabilities to build enterprise-scale AI applications 18-26x faster than alternative approaches. The C3 AI Platform enables manufacturers to rapidly integrate petabyte-scale data from any/all enterprise systems, operational sources, sensor networks, and external providers to power machine learning models that generate predictive insights to solve previously unsolvable problems.

Many global manufacturers are already using the C3 AI Platform to drive digital transformation efforts, generating results such as: reducing inventory by as much as 35%, lowering waste caused by quality defects by over 20%, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in economic value annually.