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Kelvin Platform Overview

This overview is intended for new users and prospective clients.

By the end, you will understand what Kelvin is, how it works, and where you fit in.

Video Tutorial

You can choose to watch the video walkthrough of this tutorial, or continue below to follow the step-by-step written guide.

What is Kelvin?

Kelvin is an intelligent automation platform for industrial operations.

Your PLCs, DCS, and RTUs already handle raw control at the asset level. Kelvin sits above them as the intelligence layer, turning the data they generate into smarter, higher-level decisions and automated actions across your operation.

What Kelvin enables:

  • ML-driven insights from real-time asset data
  • Automated decisions across single or multiple assets
  • Human-in-the-middle control where manual approval is needed
  • Operations-built automation without programming knowledge

Infrastructure

Kelvin is made up of three layers.

Users

The people who interact with Kelvin fall into three roles:

  • Developers and Data Scientists — build applications and machine learning models
  • Operations Teams — manage assets and act on automation through the Kelvin UI
  • Platform Administrators — configure and maintain the platform infrastructure

Cloud Services

The Kelvin cloud hosts the core platform. This includes:

  • Databases for asset data, telemetry, logs, and platform data
  • The Kelvin UI for operations teams
  • APIs and SDKs for developers and data scientists

Edge Systems

The edge is the compute layer between your existing data sources and the Kelvin cloud.

An edge system can be any device capable of running Linux and a containerized environment:

  • A virtual machine in your data center or cloud
  • A physical machine in a control room
  • A device located directly at the asset
  • A low-power ARM-based computer

The edge connects to your existing data sources such as SCADA systems, process historians, and IIoT devices. It reads data from those systems and processes it in real time.

Offline Operation

Edge systems are fault tolerant. If cloud connectivity is lost, the edge continues operating independently and syncs automatically when connectivity is restored.

Platform Components

Assets

An asset is anything you define it to be.

A beam pump, a motor, a compressor, a truck — if it is relevant to your operations, it is an asset in Kelvin. Everything in the platform connects back to assets.

Data Streams

Each asset has data streams — the individual measurements and signals coming from that asset.

Examples include temperature, pressure, flow rate, and speed. You define which streams matter for each asset.

Connectors

Connectors pull data from your existing sources into Kelvin.

Each connector links to a data source such as a SCADA system or process controller and feeds the relevant streams into the platform.

Applications

Applications, which are also known as Kelvin SmartApps™, is the intelligence that powers your automation.

It is not designed to replace your PLC's, DCS or RTU's. It runs on a layer above them that can provide either or together;

  • Higher level intelligence to your automation, such as AI integration
  • Bring better automation coordination between all your existing control systems
  • Connect your systems and data to third party resources such as your ERP or MES enterprise systems or analytical resources such as Databricks, Amazon EMR, Google BigQuery, etc.

Applications primarily will generate recommendations from your data streams and will package one or more actions together with the reasons for the recommendations, called evidences, which can be images, graphs, text information, third party links, etc.

But they can go beyond that and do anything your operations require from processing and exporting data to third party apps, sending alerts or reports, receiving actions from third party apps such as Slack, etc.

Basically anything you can program, you can do.

Recommendations are explained in more details later.

Clusters

Applications and connectors run on clusters.

A cluster is a managed group of computing resources running on your edge system. It automatically keeps your applications organised, resilient, and scalable.

Kelvin UI

The Kelvin UI is the single interface for operations teams to manage everything — assets, data, applications, and actions.

Recommendations

Recommendations are the core workflow that drives action in Kelvin.

When an application or task detects a condition, it generates a recommendation. A recommendation contains:

  • A suggested action or set of actions. These actions can be anything from changing setpoints for your assets, sending email or slack notifications, sending data to third party resources, etc. Any type of action can be performed depending only on your requirements.
  • Supporting evidence for the decision. This can come in the form of graphs, images, tect information or even links to third party resources or websites.

Operations can configure recommendations to be implemented automatically, or to require manual approval before the actions are executed.

Actions

The most common action is a control change — updating a setpoint directly on an asset.

But actions can be anything:

  • Notifications via email, Slack, or other channels
  • Data pushed to ERP or manufacturing systems
  • Any custom routine you define

Guardrails and Data Quality

Kelvin includes built-in controls to ensure decisions are always based on reliable data.

  • Bad or erroneous values are filtered out before they influence decisions
  • Erroneous data cannot be written back to assets
  • Operators are proactively notified when data quality is too poor for a reliable recommendation

Who Uses Kelvin

Developers and Data Scientists

Developers build automation programs called Kelvin SmartApps™.

SmartApps are Python-based applications built with the Kelvin SDK. The SDK handles all connectivity to the platform, so developers can focus on the logic.

SmartApps can range from simple rule-based programs to full machine learning pipelines processing real-time data.

For advanced use cases, Kelvin also supports Docker — allowing developers to work in any programming language and connect through the Kelvin API.

Operations Teams

Operations teams use the Kelvin UI to:

  • Monitor assets and review its data
  • Manage and deploy applications to monitor and control their assets
  • Act on recommendations — choosing automatic or manual approval per workflow

Operations teams can also build their own automation without any programming knowledge using Kelvin Tasks. Tasks are AI-powered and allow operations to define, deploy, and run new automated routines directly in the UI in minutes.

Platform Administrators

Platform administrators set up and maintain everything behind the scenes.

Platform setup:

  • Define asset names and types
  • Configure data streams and connectors
  • Set up and scale clusters

Ongoing management:

  • Monitor infrastructure health
  • Manage users and access

Data quality configuration:

Administrators define what good data looks like for the platform. This includes monitors for:

  • Missing data
  • Duplicate data
  • Outliers and out-of-range values
  • Availability gaps
  • Any custom quality checks relevant to your operations

Combined with guardrails on what can be written back to assets, administrators are the last line of defense for safe and accurate platform operation.

Summary

By this stage you should have a good idea of what Kelvin offers and the types of Users that can benefit from Kelvin.

Where do you fit in ?

From here you can move to the relevant areas of the Kelvin Academy to learn more about what interest you directly.

Good luck and Happy Learning !