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An Interview with Kalliroi Marini

from Atlantis Engineering

November 21, 2022

Kalliroi Marini is the Head of the Development and Innovation Department at Atlantis Engineering, the leading company in South-East Europe in CMMS/CAFM solutions, Industry 4.0 and Maintenance Consulting.

The project your company is testing via PLATOON is Predictive Maintenance for Performance Optimization of Energy Assets. Can you tell us more about it?

 

Our project is called Pre-MATE and has the goal to develop and provide to the market an advanced AI-powered predictive maintenance solution, a ‘mate’, tailored to the energy sector to ensure performance optimisation for various types of energy assets. More specifically, our solution provides a set of data-driven predictive maintenance services ranging from fault detection and failure prediction to remaining useful lifetime estimation, also generating timely alerts of potential critical situations. Expected benefits for the asset owners or manufacturers include the operational performance optimisation and reduction of unplanned downtime for the assets, controlling of repair costs, as well as the achievement of energy savings (in terms of energy generation, distribution or consumption depending on the type of asset monitored).

 

Your company philosophy declares that “If Maintenance has evolved in the 20th century into a tool to support enterprises’ profitability and competitiveness, in the 21st century it will certainly become an essential pillar for sustainable development worldwide.” What role does predictive maintenance have to play in sustainable development and the energy networks of the future?

 

Indeed, in the previous century, predictive maintenance was mostly seen as a tool to improve equipment availability supporting mostly enterprises to increase profitability and competitiveness. However, nowadays, enterprises are becoming increasingly motivated to manage the complete lifecycle of an asset not only to avoid unplanned downtime and subsequent related costs but also to reach sustainable value indexes such as minimised energy consumption, energy efficiency and so on. Regarding the role of predictive maintenance to the energy industry per se, and the energy networks of the future, it seems undoubtedly to be vital and strategic, considering the big challenges and transformations the industry is experiencing, as for example its transition from centralised to distributed models, to ensure energy efficiency, resilience and continuity.

 

What prompted your company to enter PLATOON’s Open Call process?

 

Our company, Atlantis Engineering SA (https://atlantis-engineering.com), is a Greek SME with a long-standing experience, for more than 25 years, in offering services and bespoke ICT products to the manufacturing industry, with emphasis on the decision support for the management and optimisation of production activities and assets’ life cycle, and on the streamlining of various maintenance related processes (predictive/prescriptive). The PLATOON project and its Open Call process was recognised by our company as a great opportunity to help us further develop and mature our data-driven cognitive maintenance tools and services, and properly adjust them to address the needs of the energy industry.

 

Part of your award from PLATOON was an invitation to join the Technology Transfer Programme. How do you feel this has benefitted your company?

 

With the development of a well-structured mentoring plan, the continuous guidance by our technical mentor, and the close collaboration with the PLATOON pilot partner, we managed to further customise our predictive maintenance solutions, technically adjust them for the monitoring of the health status of energy assets and test them to the pilot environment. Business-wise, this is expected to help us quickly reach a ‘market ready’ status and reinforce our position, allowing us to improve our offerings in sectors we have already penetrated as well as enter new markets of high potential (energy sector).

 

What do you think the most important achievements of PLATOON will be?

 

Leveraging on disrupting digital technologies and novel concepts, the PLATOON project envisages contributing towards major global sustainability challenges such as the increased renewable energy consumption, smart grids management, increased energy efficiency and optimised energy asset management. In my view, succeeding in bringing society one step closer to the accomplishment of the UN Sustainability Development Goals, calling for Clean Energy and Climate Action, will be the main success of this project.

 

Kalliroi, for several years now you have been involved in preparing and implementing international R&D projects/ How vital do you think international cooperation is for developing smart technology for a sustainable future?

 

Indeed, the very interesting journey of involvement in international R&D projects started a long time ago. Over the years, I came up with the following: Global sustainability challenges call for global solutions, and in the era of interconnectedness, smart technology with its high transformative potential could serve as a catalyst to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path. For this to happen, international cooperation is both desirable and necessary.