Applying cutting-edge, real-time IoT solutions powered by Cassandra for the maritime industry has doubled Alpha Ori’s business in just one year.

With approximately 90% of world trade transported by sea, Alpha Ori Technologies recognized a great opportunity to apply cutting-edge, real-time information solutions to the maritime transportation industry. Its SMARTShip™ software and cloud infrastructure leverage an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to collect and transmit more than 5,000 data points every 30 seconds from various navigation, cargo, and engine control systems onboard a vessel. The technology enables maritime operators to optimize operational efficiencies and reduce carbon emissions to meet sustainability imperatives while increasing business value and growth opportunities.

The Alpha Ori platform monitors and combines parameters such as ship speed, fuel consumption, machinery operating temperatures, pressures, pump RPMs, torque measurements on the shaft, refrigeration temperatures, wind speed and direction, and thousands of additional data points from the approximately 40 major equipment systems on a typical ship. For anywhere there is a lack of information, Alpha Ori can install additional sensors to capture it.

To provide intelligent analytics, alerts, and insights to vessel stakeholders both aboard and on shore, Alpha Ori built its platform with open source Apache Cassandra. The wide-column store, NoSQL system seemed ideal for its distributed reliability and high throughput.

Cassandra is used as the backend database for storing and processing large amounts of sensor data generated by SMARTShip. The data is then analyzed in real-time using machine learning algorithms to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies that can be used to optimize vessel performance and reduce operational costs.

Cassandra’s ability to handle large volumes of data and provide high availability and fault tolerance make it an ideal choice for Alpha Ori’s use case, as it enables the company to store and process massive amounts of data reliably and efficiently. Additionally, Cassandra’s flexible data model allows Alpha Ori to easily add new types of data to the database as needed, making it a scalable and adaptable solution for the company’s growing data needs.

“We get high read and write throughput for large volumes of data, allowing us to rapidly deliver analytics and alerts for predictive maintenance, fuel savings, enhanced asset utilization, and more,” according to Praveen Viswanath, Co-Founder and Enterprise Architect.

The Alpha Ori IT team can intensify its focus on developing and enhancing intuitive applications that increase resource optimization and add value for its expanding roster of maritime clients. “We see a bright future. At some point we are planning to move all our solutions to Cassandra,” Viswanath says. “We’re aligned for our grand vision to transform marine logistics with big data in real-time.”