Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 06 | Page 10

NEWS Enel selects Percepto’s Sparrow drone for use at power plant Open Fiber chooses Italtel for network automation I taltel, alongside Maticmind, has announced that it has completed a pioneering network automation project to automatically configure network services for Open Fiber, the wholesale-only FTTH Italian operator, which expects to reach around 19 million property units in Italy with FTTH ultra-broadband in the upcoming years. P ercepto, developers of on-site autonomous drone systems, has announced that Enel, a multinational power company and a leading integrated player in the global, power, gas and renewables markets, has completed deployment of Percepto’s Sparrow drone system for use at its Torrevaldaliga Nord power plant in Italy. The multipurpose drone platform will support operation and maintenance activities at the site. 10 When flying autonomously, Sparrow conducts inspection missions without any human intervention. Percepto’s drone-in-a-box solution makes aerial missions easier to conduct, increasing flight frequency and the probability of anomaly detection at an early stage. Once an anomaly is detected, the drone sends out an alert in real-time, describing the nature of the problem and reporting its location. At Enel’s power plant, Sparrow will fly in automated mode, under the supervision of an operator who can take control of the device at any moment as Italy’s regulatory framework does not currently allow fully autonomous drone flight. Sparrow’s ongoing data collection and analysis enables preventative maintenance, ultimately leading to a reduction in operational costs and improved site productivity. Powered by computer vision and AI technology, the drone carries a permanent dual payload of day and night-vision (thermal) cameras enabling around-the-clock operations, including the collection of aerial video, snapshots and data that can be transmitted to Enel personnel in real-time. “While drones are touted as the technology of the future, the ability to act autonomously unlocks their true potential, enabling them to act as a responsible, independent and smart ‘team member’ that provides not only a bird’s-eye view of facilities, but real, actionable insights,” said Dor Abuhasira, CEO of Percepto. INTELLIGENTCIO Open Fiber has chosen the innovative Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) platform to automate and simplify its massive operations and provide services in a faster and easier way through network automation. The deployment will allow it to add, modify and delete services automatically without interrupting the overall service and will guarantee real-time activation. Italtel, which was the first company in Italy to be certified on Cisco NSO technology, designed Open Fiber IP Backbone and has been playing an essential role in analysing Open Fiber’s needs, designing network services and the related automation leveraging on the programmable Cisco NSO platform. The platform operates on all network layers, ranging from access to IP and optical transport one. “Open Fiber is now able to deliver wholesale services on a very large scale, significantly reducing the time-to-market of new services and minimising the configuration errors,” said Domenico Angotti, Head of Engineering at Open Fiber. “Cisco’s Network Orchestrator greatly supports us for the end- to-end operation of the equipment and the supervision of the activation cycles, allowing to mainly focus our efforts on developing innovative customer services, thus increasing efficiency and reducing complexity and operating costs.” www.intelligentcio.com