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Budweiser, the World's Largest Beer Maker, is Using Low-Cost Sensors and Machine Learning To Keep Beverages Flowing (wsj.com)
The world's largest beer maker is using low-cost sensors and machine learning to predict when motors at a Fort Collins, Colo. brewery might malfunction. From a report: The Anheuser-Busch InBev SA plant was the first among the company's 350 beverage-making facilities to test whether wireless sensors that can detect ultrasonic sounds -- beyond the grasp of the human ear -- can be analyzed to predict when machines need maintenance. "You can start hearing days in advance that something will go wrong, and you'll know within hours when it'll fail. It's really, for us, very practical," said Tassilo Festetics, vice president of global solutions for the company.
The project began about six months ago when Mr. Festetics's team installed 20 wireless sensors across three packaging lines motors to measure vibrations. The sounds picked up are transmitted in real time and then compared to a normal, functioning engine's sounds, which serve as a baseline and allow the program to identify anomalies. A key advantage is that the sensors are non-invasive and don't need to be placed inside a machine. Sensors have been used for predictive maintenance in the past, but they were unable to transmit information in real time. Advances in processing data at the edge of the network, referred to as edge computing, enables companies to collect and analyze real-time sensor data from machines.
The project began about six months ago when Mr. Festetics's team installed 20 wireless sensors across three packaging lines motors to measure vibrations. The sounds picked up are transmitted in real time and then compared to a normal, functioning engine's sounds, which serve as a baseline and allow the program to identify anomalies. A key advantage is that the sensors are non-invasive and don't need to be placed inside a machine. Sensors have been used for predictive maintenance in the past, but they were unable to transmit information in real time. Advances in processing data at the edge of the network, referred to as edge computing, enables companies to collect and analyze real-time sensor data from machines.
I am not familiar with the term edge computing. After a brief 2 Google searches, I'm skeptical this is isn't just a buzzword. Can anyone elaborate?
The AE-35 dispensing unit is going to fail, Dave. You should go down to the factory floor and replace it before failure which would cause a large beer spill. I'll shut down the line for you Dave. It's perfectly safe.
(From the article) You can start hearing days in advance that something will go wrong
Translation: They're starting to run out of piss.
Oddly I've had the opposite experience. As I get older I hate all the bitter or hoppiness that tends to be the trademark of craft beers. The "weaker" beers are better (granted something like Spotted Cow and German beers like Hacker Pschorr are better than Bud).
Granted I've fallen in love with sour beers, but they tend to be high on the pricey list, so are only an occasional treat.
This is interesting since its approach can be deployed in legacy equipment that doesn't have 'smart' sensors in it or deployed across shop floors that might have various pieces of equipment that don't 'talk' to each other or a centralized monitoring point. I work for such a place that has dozens of decades-old equipment that could benefit from such an approach. It is just too bad that Budweiser is spending all their money on cool manufacturing approaches and not on producing a drinkable beer!
Granted I've fallen in love with sour beers, but they tend to be high on the pricey list, so are only an occasional treat.
Seems like you're actually a wine drinker.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Or he just likes beers that don't fit into what the trendy crowd says is "proper".
I can't stand hoppy beer. I enjoy beer just fine but I literally research the IBU and basically won't touch anything over 15-ish (generally the lower the better for me). That doesn't mean I don't like beer - just that I don't like the same beer as you.
Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So, when can we expect these in cars to detect failing hub bearing, waters bumps, idler pulley bearing, etc?
Life is not for the lazy.
A couple of microphones and a computer that compares soundbites is now "edge computing" and "machine learning."
Noise analysis of machines is neither new nor particularly exciting, and neither are wireless microphones.
Bud Miller and Coors low flavor beers have a place in the market too. They are OK served cold on a hot day. There are plenty of craft beers here near San Diego but many people can't afford or don't want to pay twelve or fifteen dollars for a six-pack.
Will you stop insulting piss, guy?
#DeleteFacebook
In my day (submarines, 80's) it was a periodic check rather than real time (and definitely not wireless;-) ) It was considered valuable, because it really worked.
Motors, etc, all had little shiny disks glued on for the magnetic pickups; the sound guys got recordings and compared with previous ones (on paper.) They were working on a way to do it with reciprocating machines like compressors and maybe even diesels, which is probably possible now.
buzzword or not. These kinds of things are a sort of silent increase in efficiency that nobody's talking about. It's much quicker and cheaper to do the maintenance than it is to clean up a mess, but only if you know when to do the maintenance. Otherwise you're stuck spending a fortune on unnecessary maintenance.
This is literally an answer to the old Dilbert joke "I want advanced notice of any unplanned outages, and I want it yesterday". That sounded funny in the 90s, in 2019 somebody did it.
What worries me is when all these little efficiency boosts are applied on a global scale. Folks are gonna bring up the old "break windows to make jobs" hyperbole but that's not what this is. This is massively increasing the efficiency of maintenance done. Imagine if you never had to worry about a car part failing and leaving you stranded because you knew exactly when to do what and for how much. Imagine never paying a mechanic to fix something that didn't need fixing. That's what this is.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"But when I'm out working in my yard or garage, I want a Budweiser."
Normal, when you are working, you want to drink something a near to water as you can get, Bud is just that.
My very first job after graduating in 1981 was in acoustic emission, using ultrasound detectors (piezo-electric transducers) working in the 100 kHz to 2 MHz region to detect cracking in steel structures, at this point this technology was in regular NDT use, i.e. to verify lifting platforms, and people were starting to use them on rotating machinery.
It must be the use of machine learning to try to recognize the failure patterns which is the only thing new here.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I mean this is a currently in development product by one of the largest and most common process control equipment manufacturers in the world. We've been trialing this with Emerson for 2 years already. It's quite a solid theory too: Build a signature of what your plant sound likes, detect changes to that signature and use wireless devices to triangulate.
I didn't realise that this has as much impact at a brewery but in hazardous industries the theory is solid: We've spent the past 20 years reducing the number of people in the plant so when things bang there are less injuries, but at the same time there's less ears in the plant able to detect a potential precursor to said bang.
Yeah they own many many brands, except for (arguably) the original Budweiser brand. I hear they've been trying argue they deserve the Budweiser name over the Budweiser Budvar brand since 1907 or so.
If it's available on any airline flight, check. Cans in MASS production is implied.
If it's available in cans at all, check. Odds are good its InBev or the 'other one'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Paper mills in the US were doing this in the 80s, using microphones and chart recorders to rack wear in motors and bearings, identifying potential problems, and scheduling repairs. A full size paper machine back then making newsprint would cost a million dollars an hour in lost production due to unplanned maintenance. And lots of mills scheduled that heavy maintenance during holidays.
I knew of several machines that used these measurements in a way to be able to change calendar bearings during production - something I never saw, but that had to be a bit scary.
I also knew of a manufacturer that in the early 90s used computer-driven analysis, including motor current draw and process timing, to determine when wire forming tools and machines were close to failure or not meeting specifications for the job. They moved really quickly from measurement to real-time serial communications to alert maintenance techs and reduce spoilage and waste, sometimes dramatically depending on the materials being formed.
And of course railroads have used microphones along yard tracks to listen for bad trucks, and get the cars scheduled for service. Very inefficient to have bearings fail out in the middle of a tunnel, for instance, with 100+ cars going form Colorado to California. Railroads are models of efficiency because they cannot survive otherwise, and haven't been able to do so for decades.
Mich of this isn't new, and was only waiting for someone to do the math and approve the projects.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Bud is chewy next to coors light.
Not saying it's not terrible, just that you can get much closer to water (think on a log scale) than bud.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In general, you don't like beer. You like some beers, particularly ones that have been engineered not to taste very much like beer. Nothing wrong with that, but to say you like beer is stretch. In general, you don't. With exceptions.
Beer predates the use of hops by centuries. Beer was beer long before that ingredient was ever even used. Granted, I don't make any claim that IPA's or other hoppy beers aren't beer, but declaring that a later adaption is the only legitimate form is just stupid. Not to mention that though IPA's and other super hoppy beers IN GENERAL have existed for a long time, they've only become the trendy little niche they are in the last 20 years or so.
Besides - as the article so plainly states, Anheuser-Busch is the largest beer producer in the world. If anything is determined to "not taste very much like beer" the exception would be the victim, not the rule.
And please people stop with the "it tastes like piss" jokes. I'm guessing that almost no one claiming that even has any idea what piss tastes like. I certainly don't, but I'd imagine it's bitter as fuck and at least that portion of it (and little else) probably resembles an IPA a lot more than your standard plebeian lager.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Seems like you're actually a wine drinker.
I do like the occasional box-o-wine, but I wouldn't put sour beers and wine in the same category. Sour beers take the bitterness out of beer.
Tassilo Festetics. It just rolls right off the tongue. Might be, I dunno, a brand name for stripper supplies or something.
Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.
Shiner used to have a purpose back when it was cheap, because it came on cans. So if you were going toobin' on the Guadalupe (locally, "gwa duh loop") river, you could take it with you. It's also much more expensive outside of Texas than inside, which I've been told is about taxation, but I don't actually know if that's true and don't care enough to look it up :)
Bud Light also has a purpose; on sale, it's cheaper than bottled water. You can substitute it for many purposes, in a pinch. Actual Budweiser, on the other hand, tastes absolutely horrible. That's probably because you can actually taste it...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wrote an App for a company here in NZ which uses miniaturised Near InfraRed (NIR) spectroscopy to analyse and determine desired characteristics of organic and non-organic materials.
The biggest wins they have so far are in what is termed as "bio-prospecting" and one recent big win was in the Australian and NZ hop growers.
When you pick hops you can scan them using this device and print off a label with the date and the alpha value (bitterness) as well as other things of interest to brewers.
It gets even more interesting for buyers of old hop stocks because hops degrade over time. With this scanner you can tell what the current levels are.
It works using machine learning to build models from NIR "finger prints" of known samples.
There's a new data arms race that has already started and this one is mining the material world through sophisticated miniature sensors.
I predict that in 10 years NIR and other sensors will, together with sophisticated AI hardware and software, be a standard feature in every smart phone just as a camera is today.
Imagine being able to scan food or medicines with your phone to check for quality, allergies (nut content), authentication, age etc.
But when I'm out working in my yard or garage, I want a Budweiser.
Is that some kind of self-motivation to finish the work as quickly as humanly possible?
Ezekiel 23:20
Shiner Bock used to be a good beer, back when it was locally made. You couldn't find it 100 miles outside of Shiner, TX. They didn't even have it in Houston. Then they got bought out by corporate, the new owners changed the formula, and hipsters invaded and ruined Austin.
You know, when I lived in Austin, we never had "keep Austin weird" bumper stickers. You know why? We didn't need 'em.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You know, when I lived in Austin, we never had "keep Austin weird" bumper stickers. You know why? We didn't need 'em.
Time waits for no one. Just be glad Texas has shitty weather, or Austin would be 100% Californian by now. Well, it's floodin' down in Texas...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Or he just likes beers that don't fit into what the trendy crowd says is "proper".
I can't stand hoppy beer. I enjoy beer just fine but I literally research the IBU and basically won't touch anything over 15-ish (generally the lower the better for me). That doesn't mean I don't like beer - just that I don't like the same beer as you.
Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.
You do know that beer has other flavours than "hops" right?
Quite a few of the beers I favour are malty (Doom Bar) or even sweet as there are quite a few fruit infused beers here in the UK.
I think IPA's are over-rated and drunk by people who don't really know anything about beer and are just trying to be fashionable. I much prefer an amber ale or an American session ale (both similar styles). German Pilsners have the bitterness, but not the hop flavour.
The problem with most places is that you only brew lager style beers, not ales. Lager style beers have to have very strong flavours to overcome the carbonation, ales which are carbonated naturally can support more complex and subtle flavours.
Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.
We have a joke here in England... Why is American beer like sex in a canoe. Its fucking close to water.
America produces some nice beers, Anchor Steam, Goose Island, Samuel Adams at a stretch... I usually say no flavour is better than a bad one, but Bud can't even manage that (erm, unless it's the original Czech Budvar, that is quality)
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.