Metroscope, an EDF startup founded in Paris in 2018, develops digital twin solutions for energy production plants, which improve efficiency and reduce emissions by monitoring and analyzing industrial assets. Today, Metroscope’s software is deployed on 67 industrial assets. To achieve a scalable, reliable, and highly secure solution, Metroscope chose to run its platform on Microsoft Azure technology. Metroscope is taking advantage of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to deploy applications along with Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Cosmos DB to manage data. For end-to-end security, Metroscope implemented Microsoft Sentinel for threat analysis, Azure Key Vault for safeguarding customer-managed encryption keys, Azure Log Analytics to analyze data and service logs, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud for continuous monitoring and security insights, recommendations, and scores. Metroscope and its customers benefit from enhanced reliability, load balancing, autoscaling, single point of entry, and robust security. And everyone benefits from lower-carbon production facilities.
“Last year looking across all 300 users, we found 2 terawatt hours of energy loss, which amounts to approximately 900,000 tons of CO2 emissions, or the equivalent of 6,000 flights between Paris and New York.”
Aurelien Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder, Metroscope
Perhaps no other industry understands the urgent need to reduce emissions and protect data quite like the energy industry. That’s where Metroscope comes in. It began in 2017, when three researchers at Electricite de France S.A. (EDF)—a multinational producer and distributor of electricity—developed a new way to monitor nuclear plants. Metroscope provides energy production facilities with a digital twin solution used to monitor and analyze industrial assets to gain greater operational insights, increase production efficiency, and lower maintenance costs. The company uses its digital twin solution to strike a balance between the increased information sharing necessary for maximizing energy efficiency and the enhanced data security needed to protect that information. It walks this line with a tailored blend of Microsoft Azure services, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and comprehensive Microsoft Security solutions, like Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
From EDF to environmental efficiency
Recognizing the entrepreneurial project’s transformational potential and the value of its three founding researchers, EDF supported and funded Metroscope as a seed investment in early 2018, making the company a member of the EDF group. EDF also became its biggest customer. As Metroscope Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder Aurelien Schwartz puts it, “Every single one of the 56 units of the French nuclear fleet is equipped with Metroscope, so EDF is our biggest customer. It’s where the technology comes from because we were working in the EDF laboratory when we created the startup.”
In addition to supporting EDF’s French nuclear facilities, Metroscope also addresses other EDF assets across France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, and it counts several international utilities in Europe and North America as customers as well. Although Metroscope initially developed its digital twin solution for power generation, the company plans to help a wider spectrum of industrial customers, such as datacenter operators that seek to better understand faults and energy losses on industrial equipment.
Schwartz states, “Our solution gives plant operators the best information possible by estimating the state of their plant so they can produce energy at max efficiency while reducing potential fuel waste.” The company’s leaders believe strongly that the energy industry has a big part to play in the global fight against climate change and that Metroscope’s solution is a vital tool in that effort. Schwartz continues, “We’re committed to helping industries become part of the answer and see no boundaries to what we can address.”
Indeed, Metroscope’s solution points to significant opportunities for improvement. Schwartz continues, “Last year, looking across all 300 users, we found 2 terawatt hours of energy loss. This amounts to approximately 900,000 tons of CO2 emissions, or the equivalent of 6,000 flights between Paris and New York.”
The power of digital twins
The Metroscope solution builds numerical replicas of the workflows of its customers’ industrial assets. Known as digital twins, these replicas represent the normative functioning state of the industrial assets they are mirroring, at any given moment, and demonstrate how assets should be working in the absence of any issues. The solution uses this “perfect” state to monitor and assess the “actual” state of the plant’s assets.
Metroscope’s solution crosschecks deviations between the two states and uses its proprietary algorithm to understand any aberrations that might appear. The solution analyzes these aberrations as “symptoms” by running fault or problem scenarios to find the exact circumstances that have led to the symptom in question. With the symptom identified and rationalized, the solution then produces an actionable real-time diagnosis. Understanding the difference between perfect and actual states helps plant operators adjust processes and correctly identify maintenance requirements, thereby saving time and reducing costs. Moreover, actionable diagnoses are invaluable for guiding and supporting newer employees.
Power plants that are running Metroscope’s digital twin solution report both increased efficiency and reduced carbon footprints. Schwartz says, “With our Azure-supported solution, we’re helping our customers avoid literally tons of CO2. This is what we are really committed to building: sober, responsible industries.”
Cloud-native, real-time data
Because the value of Metroscope’s solution depends on up-to-the-second, real-time access, the company runs everything on the Azure cloud platform. Schwartz says, “We want to provide full support that helps our customers really understand our diagnoses and recommendations. Metroscope is both the software and the service, and the Azure cloud platform is key to its delivery.”
Being cloud native and orchestrated by AKS, Metroscope’s solution facilitates load balancing, delivers resiliency and autoscaling, creates a single point of entry, and presents real-time asset insights through a highly secure and intuitive user experience. Customers access the solution via a single-page application running in their browser. The front end queries back-end servers to convey real-time updates on customer assets. The diagnoses produced get visually displayed through the easy-to-use application dashboard.
Metroscope uses Azure Application Gateway to manage traffic between the front-end experience and back-end supporting services. Data is warehoused and managed by Azure Database for PostgreSQL, which provides the persistence layer of the microservices for structured data, and Azure Cosmos DB, which provides the persistence layer of the microservices for unstructured data like code and experimental data. Tchavdar Naydenov, Metroscope Chief Technology Officer, explains, “We use web sockets to provide real-time updates, so when operators use our solution to look at a graph of a diagnostic, for example, they can see the graph changing in real time as data comes in, gaining greater understanding and insight all the time.”
Security holds the keys to success
Working with highly sensitive industrial data demands that security be integrated at the very core of the solution, rather than a secondary safeguard. Schwartz observes, “Security is a must-have, and our customers fully expect us to share the responsibility of securing data and preserving confidentiality. Microsoft helps us to do this.”
To help secure sensitive customer data, Metroscope analyzes data and service logs with Azure Log Analytics. That data—approximately 20 to 30 gigabytes a day—is then captured into Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution, for threat analysis. The AI and machine learning built into Microsoft Sentinel conduct advanced threat hunting. To safeguard sensitive customer “secrets,” like customer-managed encryption keys, Metroscope uses Azure Key Vault, which offers an additional layer of encryption and makes it quick and easy for Metroscope to manage, control, and destroy that data.
For even greater security buttressing, Metroscope adds Microsoft Defender for Cloud, which also connects to its containers and Kubernetes, and analyzes the data for weaknesses. The company gains additional vigilance of continuous assessment through a single dashboard plus insights and recommendations for improving security measures. Metroscope also benefits from the built-in Microsoft Secure Score, an aggregated security score that helps it gauge in-place security measures and further mitigate risks.
Naydenov states, “With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, we get real-time monitoring across our entire environment, extremely useful recommendations, and a single number visualizing where we are in our security efforts.” And Metroscope’s vigilance is paying off. Naydenov continues, “We are very proud to be scoring 89 percent right now and even more pleased to fully understand where our limitations lie. We are definitely improving, and we plan to reach 100 percent this year.”
This enhanced security functionality, and its seamless integration, is what led Metroscope to choose Microsoft technologies in the first place. Naydenov states, “We chose Azure for its security and how it handles the back end and integrations—Azure is an industry leader.”
The spark for transformation
Metroscope is giving its customers a boost in reaching their carbon reduction goals securely, but it is also helping customers break down longstanding informational silos to develop new, data-driven, collective, and agile practices. With improved data accuracy and recommendation insights, customers are realizing greater trust and collaboration around maintenance and operations decisions.
By unlocking and making accessible vital operational data, Metroscope’s solution is transforming how its customers and the energy industry operate. Schwartz notes, “We’re using Microsoft technologies to break down the boundaries between different departments and give everyone the same data. They can all see and agree on the state of operations and develop strategies and solutions together. It’s transformational.”
Find out more about Metroscope on LinkedIn.
“With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, we get real-time monitoring across our entire environment, extremely useful recommendations, and a single number visualizing where we are in our security efforts. We are very proud to be scoring 89 percent right now and even more pleased to fully understand where our limitations lie. We are definitely improving, and we plan to reach 100 percent this year.”
Tchavdar Naydenov, Chief Technology Officer, Metroscope
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