Enedis and Alteia announced this week their partnership around an artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Enedis aims to accelerate its digital transformation through the systematic use of visual and AI data for verification operations on its medium-voltage overhead network. Deployed on 6,500 kilometres of lines in the first year, this move to the scale of AI is a world first in the power network management sector.
Enedis and Alteia, specialists in visual data management solutions for companies, have signé́ a contract for the digital transformation of part of the maintenance operations of the network’s installations. This partnership confirms Enedis’ commitment to putting AI at the heart of its industrial performance.
In the face of the green economic recovery, and as part of Enedis’ new 2020-2025 industrial and human project, the company’s investments and predictive maintenance programmes contribute to the ecological transition to an increasingly resilient and innovative public electricity distribution network.
While the Alteia platform offers modules for vegetation inventory, pruning control and data collection for transformer inspection, the predictive inspection module will be deployed nationwide in 2021. Applied to an initial perimeter of 6,500 kilometers of lines, representing nearly half a million images collected by drones, helicopters or smartphones, and analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms, this AI program will be a world first for the sector. For Enedis, the objective is to anticipate and identify the work to be carried out on its facilities in France.
“We are extremely proud to support Enedis in this ambitious project, the first operation of such a scale designed to optimise the management of an electrical network using artificial intelligence. We know Enedis well and have been working with them since 2013 on projects to digitise power lines and optimise vegetation pruning operations using visual data.
Each step of this new project will be supported by a team of Alteia AI experts, who will continuously develop and refine the performance of the platform’s algorithms to ultimately improve the electricity supply service,” said Benjamin Benharrosh, Alteia’s co-founder and commercial director.
The Alteia platform – a spin-off from the software business of Delair, the world leader in UAV solutions for the industry – enables Enedis to deploy AI on visual data, an essential component of its Smart Grids program.
“In 2018, Enedis has launched work on image recognition to automatically identify equipment and anomalies in the medium-voltage overhead network. The use of the Alteia platform corresponds to a new and unprecedented step in the industrialization of methods related to artificial intelligence: centralization of all our photographic data, management of network inspection requirements, etc.
This partnership reinforces our belief that the public electricity grid will be even more resilient, more modern and more digital. It will help us anticipate tomorrow’s changes, and thus be at the service of the regions in order to accelerate the ecological transition,” said Antoine Jourdain, Chief Technical Officer of Enedis.
Translated from Performance industrielle : Enedis et Alteia développent une plateforme d’analyse d’images du réseau électrique aérien moyenne tension
