Applying the International Delphi Technique in a Study of Mobile Collaborative Maintenance Requirements

This paper focuses on the multiperspective requirements that influence mobile collaborative maintenance adoption and implementation in engineering asset management organizations. Mobile technologies have developed rapidly and they are viewed as business enablers, and have the potential to support asset maintenance practice. Nowadays, several specialized systems have been invested in by engineering asset organizations to enhance their asset management and maintenance systems, however most experts agree that the success rate of such systems is less than thirty per cent. The main reason for unsuccessful implementation is that there is no agreement as to what types of collaborative maintenance systems are required. To the best of our knowledge, this research is among the first in attempts to identify the mobile collaborative maintenance requirements through eliciting the expert panel points of view via a Delphi study. The aim was to develop and propose an appropriate framework for guiding engineering organizations to implement new mobile technologies in facilitating asset maintenance collaboration. The Round two of the three-round Delphi iterations identified 31 of the mobile collaborative maintenance requirements which cover technological, organizational and people perspectives

EXPERIMENTS WITH AN INTEGER PROGRAMMING FORMULATION OF AN EXPERT SYSTEM

We present expert system (ES) and Integer Programming (IP) formulations of an NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). The problem involves generating a plan for assigning faculty to courses given a variety of constraints and preferences and other tentative data. The expert system consists of a heuristic rule-based problem solver and a truth maintenance system. The IP model consists of about 700 zero-one decision variables and 300 constraints. We describe and contrast the expert system and IP models in terms of behavior, quality of results, and computational performance. We find that the expressiveness of the IP model is hampered by its single objective function, inability to encode various types of complex preferences, the lack of useful output when it fails to find a feasible solution, and a general lack of control over inference. It is also difficult to make incremental revisions to the plan produced by the IP model. In contrast, the truth maintenance system maintains justifications for assignments, which makes it possible to reason about incremental modifications to a plan. In terms of performance, we found that whenever the IP approach finds a solution, it does so quickly using the Pivot and Complement heuristic of Balas and Martin (1980). The branch and bound always failed to find a feasible integer solution when the heuristic failed to find one.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Sistema experto para la definición de umbrales adaptivos en procedimientos de mantenimiento en transmisión eléctrica

In the work the design of a connectionist expert system is realized, which uses tools of the artificial intelligence that allow the decision making for the establishment of adaptive thresholds as classifiers of the type of maintenance to be used. For the selection of a maintenance in electrical systems in general, parameters and conditions are taken into account that facilitate an adequate selection of the maintenance to be applied, for that reason the incidences of a failure, are limited in selection ranges of a maintenance for each incidence ; From 0 - 0.49 preventive maintenance is considered, taking into account the technology of the material to be used, the experience acquired by the personnel in charge of maintenance and considering the presence of a passive hot spot in all the electrical installations in full operation; Of 0.5 -0.69 is considered a predictive maintenance, with presence of an active hot spot, in this maintenance an additional range of 0.7 - 0.79 is considered considering a proactive maintenance due to the possibility of some failure, Of 0.8 - 1.0 is considered a corrective maintenance, for the equipment change. It builds the system starting from the acquisition of the data for the construction of the database, the machine inference expert system based on the operators' expertise and the human machine interface in a comfortable, friendly and reliable manner. The results are displayed on the computer screen, and the connection system database is available for other applications. Index Terms— artificial intelligence, expert system, failures, maintenance, classifiers

Applying the International Delphi Technique in a Study of Mobile Collaborative Maintenance Requirements

This paper focuses on the multiperspective requirements that influence mobile collaborative maintenance adoption and implementation in engineering asset management organizations. Mobile technologies have developed rapidly and they are viewed as business enablers, and have the potential to support asset maintenance practice. Nowadays, several specialized systems have been invested in by engineering asset organizations to enhance their asset management and maintenance systems, however most experts agree that the success rate of such systems is less than thirty per cent. The main reason for unsuccessful implementation is that there is no agreement as to what types of collaborative maintenance systems are required. To the best of our knowledge, this research is among the first in attempts to identify the mobile collaborative maintenance requirements through eliciting the expert panel points of view via a Delphi study. The aim was to develop and propose an appropriate framework for guiding engineering organizations to implement new mobile technologies in facilitating asset maintenance collaboration. The Round two of the three round Delphi iterations identified 31 of the mobile collaborative maintenance requirements which cover technological, organizational and people perspectives. Keywords: mobile technology, collaborative technology, engineering asset maintenanc

The rationale of development practices for expert systems : an empirical investigation

Practices of expert system development are not widely investigated. In this paper I describe results of case studies on the inhouse deployment of small expert systems in two companies, along with a review of empirical research. The investigation focuses on the underlying rationale of the observed practices during the stages of design, field transfer and use. The examples show the importance of integrative approaches to technical and organizational aspects of development projects. The remaining potential for organizational turbulences is explained with inherent tensions of the rationale

Multi-Agent Cooperation for Particle Accelerator Control

We present practical investigations in a real industrial controls environment for justifying theoretical DAI (Distributed Artificial Intelligence) results, and we discuss theoretical aspects of practical investigations for accelerator control and operation. A generalized hypothesis is introduced, based on a unified view of control, monitoring, diagnosis, maintenance and repair tasks leading to a general method of cooperation for expert systems by exchanging hypotheses. This has been tested for task and result sharing cooperation scenarios. Generalized hypotheses also allow us to treat the repetitive diagnosis-recovery cycle as task sharing cooperation. Problems with such a loop or even recursive calls between the different agents are discussed

The Signal Data Explorer: A high performance Grid based signal search tool for use in distributed diagnostic applications

We describe a high performance Grid based signal search tool for distributed diagnostic applications developed in conjunction with Rolls-Royce plc for civil aero engine condition monitoring applications. With the introduction of advanced monitoring technology into engineering systems, healthcare, etc., the associated diagnostic processes are increasingly required to handle and consider vast amounts of data. An exemplar of such a diagnosis process was developed during the DAME project, which built a proof of concept demonstrator to assist in the enhanced diagnosis and prognosis of aero-engine conditions. In particular it has shown the utility of an interactive viewing and high performance distributed search tool (the Signal Data Explorer) in the aero-engine diagnostic process. The viewing and search techniques are equally applicable to other domains. The Signal Data Explorer and search services have been demonstrated on the Worldwide Universities Network to search distributed databases of electrocardiograph data