GE opens digital collaboration center, partners with Qantas to drive aviation efficiencies through data analytics

AUSTIN, Texas, 7 Oct. 2016. GE Aviation opened a digital collaboration center in Austin, Texas, with launch customer Qantas Airways, to address airline operational challenges and drive efficiencies through data analytics and collaboration. Data scientists, software developers, and software architects from GE and Qantas will work together to distill some of the 10 billion data points produced by the aviation sector annually into solutions that can achieve greater fleet intelligence and operational insights.

“GE’s collaboration center in Austin is home to software developers, data scientists, and domain experts with specific backgrounds in analytics, flight-planning, and engines, depending on what we’re working on,” says GE Aviation Chief Digital Officer Jim Daily. “Opening the center with Qantas, marks the commitment from a customer who really understands the value of using data across their operation.”

“We’ve seen that even small gains in fuel efficiency add up to big benefits and lower emissions when you multiply them across the hundreds of aircraft in the Qantas fleet,” says Qantas Head of Fuel and Environment Alan Milne. “The work we’re doing with GE is giving us more insight than we’ve ever had before into the way our aircraft operate, helping us find ways of flying smarter - and this is the next step in the partnership.”

The digital collaboration center in Austin is GE Aviation’s first in the United States. In the past year, GE opened similar centers in Dubai, Shanghai and Paris are connecting data, developers and Predix, the world’s first and only cloud-based operating system built exclusively for industry. Predix is powering innovative Industrial Internet apps that turn operational data into insight for better and faster decision making.

Today, nearly 100 airlines covering more than 10,000 aircraft are GE Aviation Digital Solutions’ customers for such services as flight and fuel analytics, navigation services, airline operations management and planning and recovery.

GE’s Power of One Percent report has estimated that the global commercial airline business is spending about $170 billion per year on jet fuel. If Industrial Internet technologies – like what is being developed in the digital collaboration centre - can achieve only one percent in cost reduction, this would represent nearly $2 billion per year – or about $30 billion in fuel cost savings over 15 years for the aviation sector globally.

Daily officially opened the center with Qantas Head of Fuel and Environment Alan Milne, with local officials – including Texas State Representatives Paul Workman and Celia Israel, and Ahmed Tewfix, chairperson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin – in attendance.

The center is located at 400 W 15th Street in Austin at GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions headquarters in Austin, Texas. GE Aviation occupies approximately 27,000 square feet at the facility, and employs roughly 100 data scientists, engineers, and designers. Initiatives in the pipeline could lead to a significant increase in employment in Austin for GE Aviation by the end of 2017, officials say.

GE, the Digital Industrial Company, transformsng industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive, and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge, the "GE Store," where each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure, and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry.

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