An Infrastructure for Dynamic Decision Making in Industrial Maintenance Systems

Industrial production systems are under pressure to deliver increasing levels of machinery reliability, efficiency, safety and environmental performance. Maintenance is one key area that may provide the considerable potential to achieve these improvements. Maintenance of machinery and assets in European industry has been shown to ac-count for a significant proportion of operating costs; however it is a particular area where substantial savings are possible through the use of more technologically advanced approaches. One current European research project, DYNAMITE (Dynamic Decisions in Maintenance) intends to address this problem by developing and applying a blend of leading-edge communications and sensor technology, combined with state-of-the-art diagnostic and prognostic techniques. The objective of the project is to deliver a prototype maintenance system to enable the monitoring of machines and processes for predictive maintenance and control. This paper reports on these devel-opments.