A data-driven approach to asset management

What has been your biggest challenge? “Making sure that the company decided to invest in me.” Having originally joined Terna as an electrical engineer at the tender age of 24, Andrea Fraioli is now in charge of the Asset Management Predictive Center. When he came to the company eleven years ago, he had just returned from a very educational experience in the United States as part of the R&D department at Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) near Chicago, working on engineering applied to high-energy physics.

He says that a key attractor in joining Terna was “the strong social responsibility that working in a transmission system operator (TSO) brings. That, coupled with the company’s nationwide presence and the essential nature of the service, which operates 24 hours a day. Terna is one of the companies that are essential to the economy of the country and the lives of its citizens.” And yet, he continues, what struck him at the time was seeing so many young colleagues. “To me, they illustrated the dynamism of the working environment I had joined.” And he adds: “These enabling factors have always continually improved.”

Much has changed in eleven years. It is a sign that the company is alive and attuned to the needs of the environment and local communities. The national and international landscape has changed, as have Terna's goals and how to achieve them. Successive managements have brought a vision and stimulating input, which has also meant new and increasingly challenging goals for all of us. “We are now looking at the 2021-25 business plan, “Driving Energy”, which envisages a € 900 million investment in innovation and digitalisation. The current leadership is clearly convinced that digitalisation is an enabling tool for energy transition.” And it is precisely because we are setting our sights on achieving better energy efficiency and sustainability that the goals become more challenging each year.

One constant throughout all these years is that Terna is measured against other international companies, and this ensures that it does not remain stuck in its comfort zone. Fraioli points out, “one of the most important tasks throughout my career, especially early on, has been to carry out benchmarking activities for the monitoring of international TSOs to pinpoint best practices and performers in the O&M and asset management fields. Analysing the trends and changes affecting the issues that all TSOs necessarily have to deal with means that we can see clearly where our company needs to develop and improve – while also allowing ourselves to take pride in our achievements.”

Fraioli now heads a team that monitors various aspects of the asset management process. They are mostly young analytics experts who work with data to develop valuable insights for the management of installations (overhead power lines, cable lines and substations) throughout their life cycles. Technologies are improving at the speed of light and the digitalisation process is buzzing: “We look for people with excellent advanced analytics skills, who can promote an integrated and multidisciplinary vision of modelling and data analysis through the design and development of models, analyses and data science algorithms, under a “data driven” approach in asset management decision-making. Basically, we look for people who are flexible, proactive, results-oriented and who are totally at home with innovative digital tools.”

Innovation and digitalisation are the very things that are driving the evolution of the company's asset maintenance policy, which has changed from being a mainly condition-based to a predictive based model using new digital tools, advanced machine and deep learning techniques, and artificial intelligence. An example? The work of Andrea and his team has led to Terna exploring AI (artificial intelligence) for overhead power line monitoring. “By screening a huge number of images and cataloguing all the elements of each infrastructure, we can use a neural network to automatically identify anomalies in the components of overhead power lines that could potentially turn into a future fault.”

This means earlier intervention and therefore better safety and helps to prevent outages in advance. “We are still in the test phase, but the feedback is positive. The most important thing will then be to figure out the large-scale application of this technology to the industrial process.”

Another very important job is to find correlations between data: collecting the huge amount of data from the sensors installed on our lines and cross-referencing it. We try to identify strong and weak correlations – real patterns that can help us develop predictive maintenance. By using data skilfully, Fraioli and his team are able to create a positive framework for O&M work on installations, in accordance with the principles of sustainability, operational efficiency, quality and safety.

Andrea can now claim to have won his challenge: the company has invested in him and believes in him. And now, in a reversal of roles, his finds that his new challenge is to invest in his own employees and to “create a climate of mutual respect and trust, have humility and give people responsibility but also support them in times of difficulty.”

We ask what advice he has for any future talents who might join his team. “You always have to be humble. If you're not humble, you can't learn,” he says. “If there's one thing I would advise future colleagues to do, it's to make sure they know their weaknesses, so that they can also work on areas of improvement and cultivate their talents. Maybe it's his engineering background, but Fraioli has a practical, no-fuss approach when it comes to talent. He realises that only knowledge and awareness can turn limitations into opportunities.