ABB

Focus on software and digitalisation

As part of the corporate research centre, Dawid wants to understand how ABB’s customers work, what they do, what their values are, what their pain points are or what kind of processes they offer. “What we do with that information is to use that data and that knowledge to adapt our strategies. An in-depth understanding can help us in restructuring and also adapting our solutions for those specific customer needs. It shapes new business models and new ways of working that benefit our customers, partners and society.” This process is supported by research and development, in which ABB invests significantly, geared towards developing and commercialising the technologies, products and solutions that are of strategic importance to future growth. Of the approximately 7,000 employees in research and development, more than 60 percent are focused on software and digitalisation.

Glue

“Software is, quite simply, vital,” Dawid stresses. “ABB provides both hardware products and software solutions. Software innovation enables us to both understand and create the connection between various objects or assets – it’s the glue between various types of hardware assets. We have R&D teams that develop software solutions as well as a global digital division that focuses primarily on digitalising and creating various software solutions for our business domains. Digitalisation is becoming more important and omnipresent – it optimises the various hardware solutions we have. In the five years I have been at ABB, I have witnessed increasing investment in and a growing presence of the digital transformation here.” Collaboration plays a key role in ABB’s ability to research a range of topics from artificial intelligence, software and sensors to control and optimisation, mechatronics and robotics. Through collaboration, ABB can generate results to advance the state-of-the-art technologies used in its products and in common technology platforms that can be applied in multiple product lines. Moreover, ABB leverages its ecosystem to enhance innovation and invests and collaborates with start-ups worldwide via its corporate venture arm ABB Technology Ventures and start-up collaboration arm SynerLeap.

It is not surprising, therefore, given how crucial software innovation is to the work of ABB that the company should be such a strong contributor to and benefactor of collaboration within the ITEA framework, being a participant in no less than eight ITEA projects. “Publicly funded projects, such as those in ITEA, are very important for us since within research our role is to both unite, combine and collaborate. By doing this with other institutes and institutions that also have state-ofthe- art knowledge, hopefully, ABB and others can gain.” For example, through participation in the successful ITEA REVaMP² project ABB uses parts of the tooling that was developed to assure the source code quality of the frequency converter firmware. Additionally, the automatic build script generation for the different firmware variants of ABB’s frequency converters (ABB Drives) reduces the manual effort in the development and maintenance of the firmware variants. Another example of the benefits gained by ABB comes in the shape of the acclaimed MODRIO project that led to ABB’s Optimax Powerfit product using OpenModelica since August 2015 to generate optimising control code that controls and coordinates about 5000 MW (ca 7.5%) of German electricity production within seconds. This has subsequently been expanded to about 6000 MW, with up to 1500 MW produced by more than 2500 small solar and wind power generators that are coordinated to operate as a single big power plant.