Date: On Demand
Complimentary Webinar

With industrial gas businesses under increasing pressure to meet performance and operational goals, harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) could be a game-changer. Indeed, leveraging its enormous potential could significantly boost the industry’s efforts to enhance its efficiency, safety, and sustainability.

This exciting new technology was the subject of an exclusive gasworld webinar, sponsored by TrackAbout, a Datacor company, which is now available to watch online.

The hour-long session, titled AI in Industrial Gases: How Intelligent Automation is Transforming Operations, explored how intelligent automation is reshaping the industrial gas industry, streamlining asset tracking, and enhancing strategic decision making.

Hosts Rob Cockerill, gasworld’s Global Content Director, and journalist Thomas Dee were joined by Elizabeth Wallace, VP of Product at TrackAbout, and Lou Zhang, Senior Lead of Data Science at Datacor.

Kicking off the discussion, Wallace highlighted how AI is already making a meaningful impact on the way businesses manage their returnable assets—enabling smarter monitoring, proactive maintenance, and more efficient utilization. The webinar also explored how Datacor and TrackAbout are leveraging AI and deep learning to enhance their solutions and drive greater operational intelligence.

Improving Processes

Wallace explained that with AI-powered analytics and real-time access to critical data right from a handheld device, TrackAbout users are able to make smarter, more informed decisions on the spot.

AI can now give you deeper insights into your returnable assets—like flagging when maintenance is due or spotting trends and patterns that help boost productivity and keep you compliant.

“We know that it's a difficult problem to solve, being able to register assets, being able to trace them around the world,” she said. “So, let's make it easier by plugging holes where we can and identifying inconsistencies, giving you more information to make better decisions about your business.”

TrackAbout utilizes advanced AI technology, offering users numerous time-saving benefits. Push notifications can be sent to users’ devices; work orders or inspections can be automatically triggered when anomalies are detected; preventative measures can be implemented; and historical data can even be used to forecast events, for example.

Real-time translation and text-to-speech can also make a real difference, added Wallace.  Voice Activated Workflows mean it’s now possible to read information off the neck of a cylinder and speak it into your device, with that data instantly and accurately captured. It’s safer, more accurate, and faster, she said.

Rapid and Accurate Data Collection

The initial registration process itself can be challenging as it’s labor-intensive and prone to human error, continued Zhang. TrackAbout’s AI removes some of that heavy lifting and makes it far quicker and easier.

There’s vitally important information stamped on these cylinders, containers, and totes, including serial numbers, dates of manufacture, and retest markings. Having to collect all that data, add barcodes, and scan each item takes a lot of effort, especially if you’re dealing with large inventories and hundreds, or thousands, of assets.

With TrackAbout and AI, all this data can be instantly captured by taking a simple photograph, says Zhang.

“We use computer vision methods, so when you take a picture of a cylinder, what we'll do is first implement a method called segmentation, which removes the irrelevant background of the picture and just focuses on the cylinder itself,” he says. “This proprietary method can identify strings of text and snip them off by creating a heat map of where it thinks text is and the regions where there's a higher probability of text.”

AI takes care of reading and interpreting everything needed to identify the cylinder—like the serial number, specs, and even where it was made.

“We use the technology called ‘deep learning’—a subset of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to model and solve complex problems,” he said. “This algorithm is learning by itself to recognize the text that's coming off the cylinders. These networks can learn from vast amounts of data, automatically identifying patterns and making decisions without any sort of explicit programming.”

These image recognition technologies are now accessible using your smartphone and the TrackAbout mobile app, and can analyze a picture of a gas cylinder, automatically strip the text away in seconds, and add it to our database, said Zhang.

“The camera opens, the user walks around the cylinder, and our app scans all the symbols they can see. Once the user has done a good 360° turn, we should have all the markings several times,” he said.

“Instead of going to your app and filling in all these fields, now all of these fields will be automatically filled in with the information from that picture. Not only does that reduce manual input and save you time, but it also reduces human error. As a bonus, you now have a picture of the ground truth of that cylinder in the app itself, so if there is any question later down the road, you have a picture of the cylinder and you can reference that directly.”

“We trained our model to recognize curved embossed text on metal cylinders by feeding it tens of thousands of examples. We have examples where humans would be confused by that text, but our algorithm is able to label it correctly.”

Even better? The AI becomes its own source of data for improving the model, noted Zhang.

“As you use the app, it's going to get better. You are supplying us with training data. That goes into the deep learning algorithm,” he says. “There's no manual programming. This is all an automatic process that is kind of like a virtuous cycle that reinforces itself and gets better over time.”

Saving Time and Effort

TrackAbout uses cutting-edge technologies that have only recently become available and significantly enhance asset registration and management.

“If you're a big manufacturer or cylinder distributor with millions of assets, it might have taken you many months to register those cylinders before,” said Zhang, “but with this new technology, we estimate that the time taken will be reduced by 80-90%”

AI is changing the way we all do business. With TrackAbout you’re able to stay ahead of the game and be even more competitive.

If you missed the webinar, you can access it for free here.

Webinar Highlights

Below are some of the key takeaways from the session:

5:00 - Introduction

8:10 - What matters most in effective asset management? (Elizabeth Wallace, VP of Product, TrackAbout)

9:50 - Using AI to improve master data accuracy

12:45 - Predictive maintenance and anomaly detection

15:40 - Advanced analytics and insights using AI agents

18:10 - Identifying process inconsistencies

21:50 - Enable early warning signs

24:30 - Drive positive customer experiences

28:00 - Asset registration acceleration (Lou Zhang, Senior Lead of Data Science, Datacor)

43:20 - Q&A