Design Objective
Operational sustainability data sources are generally heterogeneous and require capabilities to be consolidated for viewing, analytics, and data synchronization.
The objective of an environmental profile concept, for environmentally critical assets or functional locations, is to provide a single point of overview to environmental performance. Operations can track environmental performance, like the carbon footprint of individual assets, or relative scores across asset types based on emission sources from related assets. With insights into environmental performance, like carbon footprint, operations can make improvements at an actionable level of granularity and start tracking the environmental impact of change.
The addition of a generic emission source data structure can be designed to include the date, emission types, material types, amount and unit of measure, and other metadata into a single common record of material consumption and emission. Collected data may represent continuous, fugitive, or count-based emissions. Collected data needs to be quantified by date, emitted material, amount, and unit of measure.
The asset or functional location page in the IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) Manage application, can be designed to provide an environmental tab with all environmentally related data. Using a tabular view of assets and functional locations, a relative sustainability score can be provided in a sustainability column.
Environmental Profiles
An environmental profile object structure can be designed and delivered as a sustainability industry solution, extending the standard views of assets and functional locations. Such an environmental profile presents all environmental emissions related to an asset or a functional location.
Using the environmental profile metadata, a tabular view may be designed to support use-cases for manual filtering and sorting, or automatic queries, providing insights into the environmental characteristics. Such insights may be of any type, trend, or outlier emission of an asset or location. AI models may use environmental profile data as a feature for asset health, sustainability scoring, or asset maintenance strategies.
As the sustainability reporting tool focuses on emissions at selected site-level locations and monthly data aggregations, the environmental profile provides emission data at the fine-grained actionable source level of assets, parts, locations, and functional sub-locations.
Emission Sources
An emission source is a fine-grained atomic unit of emission data. It unifies the data schema for types of emission workflows, like meters, inspections, incidents, and work orders.
An emission source captures the metadata needed to record an emission, such as the type of material, amount, unit of measure, and time-stamp information. Collected emission data may be continuous, fugitive, or count-based. The emission source data is normalized to a Carbon dioxide equivalent value (CO2e) using the emission factor of the material type.
An emission source is generic and is associated with a parent object that defines the context, for example, a meter, incident, or work order. The parent object is related as part of an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) workflow that relates the emission source to an asset or a functional location. The environmental profile hence is designed to become the collection of associated emission source objects of an asset or a functional location.
Meters
Asset Meters and Location Meters represent instances of meter types with manual or automatic meter readings, for example, gas, water, or power consumption.
Meters may capture the meter reading as an emission source object. Inspection workflows will schedule technicians to perform asset inspections with meter readings.
IoT Devices
The IBM MAS Manage application provides high-resolution streaming real-time data from connected devices and control systems. Data is provided in device messages with alphanumeric value types. Device data may be captured as an emission source object.
Inspections
Inspections represent a periodic manual asset or functional location inspections performed by technicians. An inspection is performed following a job plan with many inspection steps, including the sampling of asset data. Some sampled data may be of direct environmental significance or may be input to asset health models that provides a sustainability health score. Planning maintenance using health scores may prevent environmental incidents or drive replacement and improvement programs.
Inspections and resulting data are associated with the inspected assets. Inspections may result in meter readings. Inspection data may also be captured as an emission source object.
Incidents
Incidents are unexpected and unplanned events with health, safety, and environmental impact as fugitive emissions. An incident is recorded as one or more incident events each documenting a specific aspect of the incident, such as an environmentally impactful leak or spill of material.
The type, severity, and classification of the event are documented as an emission source object. Incidents related to an asset or functional location context and the emissions from the incident contribute to the environmental profile.
Work Orders
Work Orders are planned asset maintenance activities across the lifecycle of the asset. Such maintenance includes for example repairs, part replacements, and refilling of consumables. The parts or consumables are referred to as Items.
A Work Order is tracking metadata related to the activity such as transportation and use of items. Replacement and disposal of parts may be used for accounting for the carbon footprint of items. Refilling consumables may be an indicator of abnormal consumption or leak. The environmental impact of the Work Order and Items may be captured as a sequence of emission source objects across the asset lifecycle.
Environmental Profile Information Model
The environmental profile and emission source objects unify the operational sustainability information.
Concept Design
Design pages have been explored providing a user experience for creating emission sources using the environmental workflows.
Meter design
The Asset and Location Meters are extended with the emission source data like source type, source category, source impact, and material. The meter readings, in source material units, are transformed into CO2e units.
Incident design
The Incident Events are extended with the emission source data like source type, source category, and source impact. There is no metering on the incident emissions and a list of emitted material, amount, and unit of measurement is entered. The environmental impact from the incident is aggregated to the CO2e unit.
Item Master design
HVAC assets consume refrigerants. Performing maintenance on an asset will inspect the compressor refrigerant pressure. A leak may require a refrigerant refill. The work order will include the service items and the actual usage will be recorded when closing the work order. An emission source can be created using the consumed material and the equivalent CO2e units.
Asset Environmental Profile design
Environmental sources are traceable from the related asset or locations. The tabular view allows filtering by type, category, and other metadata for analysis of performance.
Assets Environmental Score design
Assets of the same or comparable types can be listed with sustainability scores normalized by asset performance KPIs.