Erkki Jantunen

Mobile solutions for engineering asset and maintenance management

Purpose – This paper seeks to present an overview of current trends in employing wireless solutions to engineering asset and maintenance management.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews literature and technological advances in wireless technologies and their applications in engineering asset and maintenance management from the viewpoint of assessing their potential impact, use and penetration in industrial practice. Rather than attempting a literature survey, the paper highlights emerging opportunities, benefits and potential hurdles in the adoption of mobile application solutions for industrial assets.Findings – Despite the fact that the use of advanced application solutions in manufacturing, production or process facilities takes place at a different scale, the emerging trend has already shown that mobile technologies have a great potential to redefine and re‐engineer the conventional setting for industrial asset and maintenance management. They have already begun to form the basis for offerin...

Flexible software for condition monitoring, incorporating novelty detection and diagnostics

Condition monitoring and machinery fault diagnosis are central to the implementation of efficient maintenance management strategies. They can be based on empirical modelling, which aims at associating measured data to machine conditions. Arguably, different monitoring tasks present different challenges to the maintenance engineer. This paper presents the development of a flexible software solution for condition monitoring, novelty identification and machinery diagnostics, which can easily be customised to a wide range of monitoring scenarios. Its main constituents are a number of independent software modules, such as the fault and symptom tree, the fuzzy classification module, the novelty detection and the neural network diagnostics sub-systems. It is implemented on two different applications, namely machine tool monitoring and gearbox monitoring.

Ubiquitous computing for dynamic condition-based maintenance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a flexible architecture concept to provide a ubiquitous computing framework where condition‐based maintenance (CBM) data and information can be easily accessed, and maintenance decisions may be performed wherever required.Design/methodology/approach – The architecture is based on a platform of intelligent web services, and logically structured decision layers based on the open systems architecture for CBM definition, from condition monitoring to decision support, and provides automated extraction of results. The application of web services is demonstrated, first related with an original vision on the adoption of mobile devices for dynamic maintenance management solutions, and then with a more conventional web‐based predictive maintenance management system.Findings – Scenarios for the upgrade of existing preventive maintenance practices towards condition‐based strategies are sufficiently different to require customised solutions. A web‐based platform can w...

E-MAINTENANCE, A MEANS TO HIGH OVERALL EFFICIENCY

Today the number of industries putting emphasis on maximising Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is rapidly increasing. Instead of looking only at one aspect of production, modern enterprises seek to plant a series of joint activities, aimed at minimising losses, by improving on Performance, Quality and Availability at the same time. Emphasising these three factors simultaneously leads to the introduction of efficient maintenance, including sound strategies, such as Condition Based Maintenance (CBM). The incorporation of key enabling technologies within a Condition Based Maintenance strategy, such as wireless networking, internet & mobile computing, minature sensing devices and location awareness, has paved the way to the introduction of e-Maintenance. The paper looks at the key features pertaining to the successful implementation of e-Maintenance into modern industry. It then highlights steps taken towards the design and implementation of an e-Maintenance architecture within the EU Integrated Project ‘Dynamite’. The paper concludes with a discussion on current challenges and future prospects of e-Maintenance.

Challenges in Data Management in Product Life Cycle Engineering

It is expected that the capability of managing the complete product life cycle in its phases will give the necessary boost for European Manufacturing Industry. Many efforts have been put into the creation of product lifecycle management systems, but it would seem that there is a gap between the existing reality and the specification of expected features. The article addresses this subject from critical point of view and tries to pinpoint the weaknesses of the existing solutions such as standards and database solutions. This work also tries to show the possible ways to follow that could help in solving the problems.

E-Maintenance: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities for Modern Industry

Abstract E-Maintenance has upraised growing interest in recent years. Equipment manufacturers seek to provide equipment-related services in an effort to increase their immunity to market variations. Furthermore, both equipment manufacturers and users are paying more attention to issues such as energy-efficiency and sustainability, in parallel with safety, quality and reduced costs. This emerging market landscape has given a boost to research in e-Maintenance, aimed at making more efficient use of resources and engineering assets. However, it seems that manufacturing companies and end users are somewhat uncertain on how to go ahead but also on which are the particular benefits they may gain with the adoption of e-Maintenance technologies. One reason is that various actors in this area of research offer somewhat differing views on the issue. This paper presents a generic view of e-Maintenance and points out both the benefits as well as the hurdles there still exist on the road to support the complete life cycle of a product with e-Maintenance, while providing a critical assessment of the current state of affairs. Based on this discussion, the paper seeks to assess how e-Maintenance will develop within the next five to ten years. Special emphasis is given on how the end users can benefit from e-Maintenance i.e. how radical the change really is and what are the financial implications related to its adoption.

Economical and technological prospects for e-maintenance

E-Maintenance has raised increased interest in recent years. During the last years we have seen the development of e-Maintenance techniques. The key elements are the extensive use of Internet that has exploded and rapid development of sensors and processing power. It can be claimed that the use of e-Maintenance at the moment still is at infant stage. This paper offers a generic view of e-Maintenance and points out both the benefits as well as the hurdles there still exist on the road to support the complete life cycle of a product with e-Maintenance, while providing a critical assessment of the current state of things. Based on this discussion, the paper seeks to assess how e-Maintenance will develop within the next five to ten years. Special emphasis is given on how the end users can benefit from e-Maintenance i.e. how radical the change really is and what are the financial implications related to its adoption.

Diagnosis for improved maintenance services: Analysis of standards related to Condition Based Maintenance

Depending on the maintenance strategy there can be enormous differences how much energy the machinery uses and how much waist it produces. It has become a common practise to study the efficiency of production machinery together with the quality of production and availability of this machinery i.e. the overall effectiveness is studied. In order to reach high efficiency, high availability and good quality, the production machinery has to be in the condition to fulfil these goals. In principle there are two questions that need to be answered when maintenance is planned for tackling the above described situation: 1) What do we have to do? 2) When do we need to take action? The maintenance strategy that has been developed to answer these questions in an optimal way is Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) i.e. the maintenance actions are based on the need of the machinery. Up to this level everything is very logical and clear but unfortunately the current reality in the industry is far from optimal. It is not an easy task to define the condition of production machinery and it is not easy to say what needs to be done and when. This paper is oriented to help to answer the What question i.e. diagnosis of the condition of machinery and When question i.e. prognosis of wear development is not discussed in detail. However, the What question as such is already very demanding. The reason for this is that automatic diagnosis should be based on measurements of the condition and this becomes very difficult in practise due to the differences in the production machinery and the difficulty in separating the condition information from information that is related to the production parameters.

Self adaptive diagnosis of tool wear with a microcontroller

Tool wear monitoring is very important for economical reasons. In this paper a new and very economical solution is presented. The idea is to use easily available microcontroller based hardware, which is very cheap due to mass production. The cheap hardware is combined together with sophisticated software. The use of regression analysis techniques together with fuzzy logic makes the system self adaptive, i.e., the system can monitor new tools automatically after a short learning period. The automatic learning period typically only lasts in the order of 5% of the total tool life time of an individual tool and thus makes the introduction of the method really simple and effective. The article focuses on the introduction and use of microcontroller based hardware but also covers and summarizes the principles behind the new approach which makes it possible to use hardware with limited capability. A more detailed description of the physical and mathematical background can be found in the given references. The proposed approach is tested with data from drilling tests.

Economic Value of Technologies in an e-Maintenance platform

Abstract In the past years, scientific papers appeared about the opportunities offered by new technologies in e-Maintenance context. Indeed, a great number of contributions can be found in literature analyzing and proposing different prospects to improve maintenance processes by leveraging on the e-Maintenance concept and its applications using a myriad of e-technologies. On the other hand, little attention has been paid on the selection and configuration of these technologies based on their economic value for the user. This has rarely been discussed and the present paper wants to provide an initial step to fulfil this gap. The results of the analysis, carried out in companies located in Italy and Finland, are reported in order to compare different situations where an evaluation of the economic value was studied. The examples were selected to be representative and to help opening the discussion on the economic feasibility and business perceptions of this kind of applications.