Assisted-Driven Design of Customized Maintenance Plans for Industrial Plants

Abstract

Current production systems that respond to market demands with high rates of production change and customization use complex systems. These systems are machines with a high capacity for communication, sensing and self-diagnosis, although they are susceptible to failures, breakdowns and a loss of reliability. The amount of data they provide as a productive system and, individually, as a machine can be treated to improve customized maintenance plans. The objective of this work, with an operational scope, is to collect and exploit the knowledge acquired in the industrial plant on failures and breakdowns based on its historical data. The acquisition of the aforementioned data is channeled through the human intellectual capital of the work groups formed for this purpose. Once this knowledge is acquired and available in a worksheet format according to the Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) methodology, it is implemented using Case-Based Reasoning algorithms in a Java application developed for this purpose to carry out the process of RCM, accessing a base of similar cases that can be adapted. This operational definition allows for the control of the maintenance function of an industrial plant in the short term, with a weekly horizon, to design a maintenance plan adjusted to the reality of the plant in its current operating context, which may differ greatly from the originally projected plan or from any other plan caused by new production requirements. This new plan designed as such will apply changes to the equipment, which make up the production system, as a consequence of the adaptation to the changing market demand. As a result, a computer application has been designed, implemented and validated that allows, through the incorporation of RCM cases already successfully carried out on the productive system of the plant, for the development of a customized maintenance plan through an assistant, which, in a conductive way, guides the plant maintenance engineer through their design process, minimizing human error and design time and leveraging existing intellectual capital.