Pratt & Whitney taps IBM to capture value of Big Data

Farnborough, England – Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp. company, is teaming with IBM to enhance the engine fleet management and health solutions Pratt & Whitney offers to customers. 

 

Pratt & Whitney, with IBM's help, will significantly broaden its current performance monitoring capabilities of more than 4,000 operational commercial engines. IBM will assist Pratt & Whitney in leveraging its military diagnostic, prognostic, and health management capabilities to enable proactive and automated logistics to its rapidly expanding commercial fleet.

 

This will provide Pratt & Whitney customers with longer time on-wing, complement current asset maintenance alerts, and deliver better insight into flight operational data.

 

"By incorporating learnings from our military engines programs where we are pushing the envelope in terms of monitoring capabilities, and teaming with IBM to integrate component and system health information, we will strengthen our commercial engine health analytics offering for customers," said Matthew Bromberg, president, Pratt & Whitney Aftermarket. "This will enable us to accurately and proactively monitor the health of our customers' engines and give us further visibility to plan ahead for optimized fleet operations while reducing customers' costs." 

 

"Today's aircraft engines can generate up to a half terabyte of data per flight. This data deluge can be made into a critical resource if coupled with predictive analytics, creating a valuable asset for early warning or fault detection and improved visibility in to the overall health of aircraft engines," said Alistair Rennie, general manager, Business Analytics, IBM. "By applying real-time analytics to structured and unstructured data streams generated by aircraft engines, we can find insights and enable proactive communication and guidance to Pratt & Whitney's services network and customers."

 

IBM has established Big Data and Analytics technology that spans research and development, solutions, and software. IBM has invested $24 billion to build its capabilities in Big Data and Analytics through R&D and more than 30 acquisitions. More than 15,000 analytics consultants, 6,000 industry solution business partners, and 400 IBM mathematicians are helping clients use big data to transform their organizations.