Space-Time Insight offers an IoT analytics platform and a portfolio of IoT analytics applications for power generation and distribution, logistics and other industrial uses. Their platform and applications combine device, business and external data to give informed views of on-going critical business operations, providing right-now alerts and future predictions. These operational views then allow enterprises to improve customer service, manage operational risk and cost, and improve bottom line profitability. In many ways Space-Time Insight’s applications are good examples of current generation IoT applications.

Among Space-Time Insight’s customers are public utilities; Arizona Public Service, Florida Power & Light, Hydro One, PG&E and Southern California Edison; and multi-national logistics and transportation companies. All of these companies have millions of fixed and mobile physical assets that are widely distributed over large geographic areas. Each asset is part of an interconnected system where failure of an asset can impact the whole chain. Not only can asset failure impact service delivery it can affect worker and customer safety. Hence Space-Time Insight’s focus on situational intelligence whereby operators are given real-time or even advance notice of system asset failures that has significant risk management benefits. Figure 1 shows an example dashboard for their recently released version 2.0 Outage Intelligence Application for power utilities.

Figure 1. STI Outage Intelligence Application 2.0

Essential to Space-Time Insight’s analytics are integration of enterprise, external and device data to provide a complete situational analytic context. For example, their Outage Intelligence Application combines SCADA device data, workforce management system information and external location and geo-spatial data. Herein lies the vision of IoT analytics; it’s the artful combination of data from sources historically not used for analysis and actionable insight.

As shown in Figure 1, contextualization comes from multiple diverse on-screen visualized objects, data overlays within objects, information pop-ups, and interactive viewing controls. Users gain both at-a-glance highlights for triage and management-by-exception and the ability to drill-through for deeper root-cause diagnostics. This app exemplifies the next maturation step beyond SCADA where IoT provides an operations wide view of on-going system performance and health.

Company

Founded in 2007, Space-Time Insight is a 150+ employee private company with headquarters in the San Francisco bay area that is focused on providing IoT analytic applications. They offer an advanced IoT analytics platform named SI Suite, a portfolio of industry specific applications and professional services for custom app development.

Platform

Currently on version 6.0, SI Suite is a foundation for applications used to assess, analyze and respond to mission-critical events for enterprises that are highly physical asset-dependent. SI Suite (see figure 2) combines advanced analytics including artificial intelligence, rich dashboards integrating various performance charts and annotated geographical maps, alerts/alarms and IoT/enterprise data.

Figure 2. SI Suite 6.0

Key components of the platform are:

• SI Studio – Developers can visually instantiate and connect various data, analytics and visualization objects. Property sheets configure the behavior of the objects. The visualized application module network enables business analysts, data scientists, and app developers to collaborate on development even though they have different technical skill levels. SI Studio is built on top of the Eclipse IDE.
• SI Viewer – This HTML5-based platform runs on desktop and mobile devices upon which the apps from SI Studio are visualized and accessed by users. Data visualizations can be spatial, temporal, nodal or business-style graphs. Interactive controls include sort, filter, rank, group, drill-to-detail-view, share and print.
• SI  Server - A run-time software server platform for executing apps built using SI Studio. SI Server executes data retrieval, integration, transformation, correlation and processes user commands from SI Viewer. The server can be hosted on a private cloud or on-premise. Data source options include ERP (e.g. SAP HANA), NoSQL (e.g. Hadoop/Hive and relational databases. Data
• (e.g. SAP HANA), NoSQL (e.g. Hadoop/Hive and relational databases. Data access can be batch or streaming (via Spark). Predictive models can be embedded via APIs to R. The server also includes a proprietary in-memory engine for correlating spatio-temporal signals from smart devices.

Applications

In addition to the Outage Intelligence Application (Figure 1), Space-Time Insight offers various pre-configured IoT and business analytics applications including:

• Asset Intelligence – Application assists with maintaining, operating and replacing operational assets. Uses risk assessments of asset failure and under-performance with planning and remediation tools to augment capital expense and operations planning. Asset Intelligence is meant to increase asset portfolio reliability and safety.
• Transmission and Distribution Intelligence – This app provides analysis of past, present and simulated outages to augment contingency planning and improve operational efficacy. Also supports planning for renewable energy system deployments.
• Smart meter and Demand Intelligence – Application provides demand-side analytics for the AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure). Used to find non-technical loss locations and optimize grid end-point operations and financial contribution.
• Wholesale Markets and Trading Intelligence – This app gives a comprehensive view of the energy market including generation reserves and virtual power plants. Assist with trading optimization and congestion minimization.
• Freight Brokerage Intelligence – Application analyzes load board and lane rate provider data to best match loads with capacity and maximize margin. Enables freight brokers to optimize shipping profit and maximize delivery performance.
• Government Multi-INT – Users of this app can discover and exploit data from multiple sources for risk management and operations performance improvement. What-if models and real-time analytics assist with right-now decision making on critical events.

Each of these applications focuses on serving a specific function for their users. They are examples of how smart device data will be integrated with other information to provide powerful business operations and strategy insight.