Praveen Viswanath Transforms Marine Logistics at Alpha Ori with AI
Praveen Viswanath, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Alpha Ori Technologies
Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Alpha Ori Technologies
Praveen Viswanath is co-founder and Chief Architect at Alpha Ori Technologies. Part of the initial 3 member founding team, he is also the lead solutions architect for Alpha Ori’s one of a kind IOT platform for data acquisition, processing & analytics from ships, based on the microservices pattern. Alpha Ori’s SMARTship software collects more than 5,000 data points from various navigation, cargo, and engine control systems onboard a vessel. It enables maritime operators to optimize efficiencies and reduce carbon emissions to meet sustainability imperatives while increasing value and growth. In the past year, the company has doubled the number of vessels using Alpha Ori solutions to save money on fuel, mitigated maintenance-related risks, and reduced carbon emissions. For 200 ships on their SMARTship platform in 2021, Alpha Ori calculated $5M in cost savings and 30,000 metric tons of emissions saved on behalf of their customers.
Watch the video to learn how Alpha Ori transforms marine logistics with real-time data.
Transcript
At Alpha Ori we have been trying to transform the maritime. We are in the business of digitalization through maritime IoT and application of leading edge technologies like AI and ML to transform the data we collect from ships and driving value to the stakeholders. We have built a solution, components which is installed on board and on the cloud. It can be used by various partners to visualize the data on the ship.
AI and ML are fundamental to various modules within Alpha Ori's application, which is called SmartShip. Within SmartShip, one of the examples is TFOC total fuel oil consumption module, which helps optimize fuel consumption. Achieved by optimizing the speed and the route, looking at various parameters like weather and current and waves. Looking into the future and trying to recommend a route to the ship thereby saves fuel. We estimate that our platform has saved approximately $38 million for our customers, which equates roughly to hundred thousand metric tons of fuel which is also equivalent to roughly 275,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
Being a smaller organization, when we started, we had a small team with few developers and engineers who had experience on Cassandra. Cassandra itself is a powerful database, but it's very difficult to manage in production. DataStax Astra has taken away the pain of management from our team. It's also an enterprise ready solution, so it provides. security features and backup and other management. orchestration, which earlier would have been done using custom handwritten scripts which were error prone, which lead to all sorts of risks with governance, security, etc. By going with Astra, we also reduce a lot of time spent on setting up clusters, managing this infrastructure, monitoring it. So it has been quite hands down, one of the best decisions I think we have taken.
We are considering various GenAI use cases within the application. So it could be in different categories, maybe chatbots. It could be explaining the reasoning behind a decision taken by the AI algorithm in generating a particular route. It could be decision support. So there are several use cases where we are exploring the application of Astra for vector search.