Predictive Maintenance For Connected Vehicles

Solution

Accelerating time-to-market and compliance controls

Vantage Power worked with Luxoft (an AWS Partner Network Advanced Consulting partner) to create VPVision - an innovative telemetry platform. VPVision brings the AWS cloud platform to each connected vehicle, providing Vantage Power customers with an overview of each vehicle’s powertrain components, including batteries, control systems, engines, motors, and electric generators.

VPVision is built around an IoT architecture (AWS IoT Core, AWS Greengrass, and AWS IoT Analytics), then combined with Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) and AWS Lambda. This optimizes the processing of hundreds of thousands of data points per minute. In turn, it provides OEMs and operators with valuable insights, allowing them to create predictive maintenance models and implement real-time preventative action. Here are just six of VPVision’s benefits:

• The system monitors everything from vehicle speed to engine health and battery-pack-level diagnostics. It enables operators and OEMs to receive insight and reporting for over 6,000 data points from each vehicle.
• VPVision collects, processes, stores, and presents real-time vehicle data, automatically, via the cloud.
• It enables real-time geolocation visualization and two-way communication between fleet managers and drivers.
• When routine maintenance is required, real-time alerts keep downtime to a minimum.
• It leverages IoT components from AWS such as IoT Analytics, Greengrass ML, Sagemaker, and many more.
• The team developed a machine learning model that used AWS IoT Sagemaker Notebooks to analyze ‘idle time’ and ‘vehicle location’ data, automatically.

Result

Real-time insight, and connecting vehicles to the cloud

Luxoft provided Vantage Power with the technical expertise, domain experience, and scale, to build a unique solution that:

• Limits the time vehicles are in maintenance shops, reducing operational costs by over 80%.
• Quickens time-to-market for OEMs by six months.
• Lowers overall costs by streamlining aftermarket support with centralized, real-time data.
• Identifies the ideal time and location for lithium-ion battery balancing, extending the operational life of a battery by around 10%.
• Reduces costs and admin through the application of edge computing and remote diagnostics which analyze data, on-vehicle, and report back issues that need attention.
• Thanks to scenario modelling, plus early cell-level fault detection and mitigation, customers can avoid battery replacements which could cost over $50,000 per bus.
• Complies with new emissions regulations.

Working together, AWS and Luxoft developed a fully-operational solution that has been improving the cost control and performance of a growing fleet of retrofit buses.