Remote maintenance support with the aid of cyber-physical systems and cloud technology

This article discusses how a business model based on traditional maintenance can evolve to generate servitization strategies, with the help of remote maintenance support. The application of cyber-physical systems and cloud technologies play a key role for such maintenance purposes. In fact, the utilization of large quantities of data collected on machines and their processing by means of advanced techniques such as machine learning enable novel techniques for condition-based maintenance. New sensor solutions that could be used in maintenance and interaction with cyber-physical systems are also presented. Here, data models are an important part of these techniques because of the huge amounts of data that are produced and should be processed. These data models have been used in a real case, supported by the Machinery Information Management Open System Alliance Open System Architecture for Condition-Based Maintenance standard architecture, for streamlining the modeling of collected data. In this context, an industrial use case is described, to enlighten the application of the presented concepts in a working pilot. Finally, current and future directions for application of cyber-physical systems and cloud technologies to maintenance are discussed

Security aspects in cloud based condition monitoring of machine tools

In the modern competitive environments companies must have rapid production systems that are able to deliver parts that satisfy highest quality standards. Companies have also an increased need for advanced machines equipped with the latest technologies in maintenance to avoid any reduction or interruption of production. Eminent therefore is the need to monitor the health status of the manufacturing equipment in real time and thus try to develop diagnostic technologies for machine tools. This paper lays the foundation for the creation of a safe remote monitoring system for machine tools using a Cloud environment for communication between the customer and the maintenance service company. Cloud technology provides a convenient means for accessing maintenance data anywhere in the world accessible through simple devices such as PC, tablets or smartphones. In this context the safety aspects of a Cloud system for remote monitoring of machine tools becomes crucial and is, thus the focus of this pape

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

Securing the Participation of Safety-Critical SCADA Systems in the Industrial Internet of Things

In the past, industrial control systems were ‘air gapped’ and isolated from more conventional networks. They used specialist protocols, such as Modbus, that are very different from TCP/IP. Individual devices used proprietary operating systems rather than the more familiar Linux or Windows. However, things are changing. There is a move for greater connectivity – for instance so that higher-level enterprise management systems can exchange information that helps optimise production processes. At the same time, industrial systems have been influenced by concepts from the Internet of Things; where the information derived from sensors and actuators in domestic and industrial components can be addressed through network interfaces. This paper identifies a range of cyber security and safety concerns that arise from these developments. The closing sections introduce potential solutions and identify areas for future research

Blockchain Technology Helps Maintenance to Stop Climate Change

The development and interest in Industry 4.0 together with rapid development of Cyber Physical Systems has created magnificent opportunities to develop maintenance to a totally new level. The Maintenance 4.0 vision considers massive exploitation of information regarding factories and machines to improve maintenance efficiency and efficacy, for example by facilitating logistics of spare parts, but on the other hand this creates other logistics issues on the data itself, which only exacerbate data management issues that emerge when distributed maintenance platforms scale up. In fact, factories can be delocalized with respect to the data centers, where data has to be transferred to be processed. Moreover, any transaction needs communication, be it related to purchase of spare parts, sales contract, and decisions making in general, and it has to be verified by remote parties. Keeping in mind the current average level of Overall Equipment Efficiency (50%) i.e. there is a hidden factory behind every factory, the potential is huge. It is expected that most of this potential can be realised based on the use of the above named technologies, and relying on a new approach called blockchain technology, the latter aimed at facilitating data and transactions management. Blockchain supports logistics by a distributed ledger to record transactions in a verifiable and permanent way, thus removing the need for multiple remote parties to verify and store every transaction made, in agreement with the first “r” of maintenance (reduce, repair, reuse, recycle). Keeping in mind the total industrial influence on the climate change, we can expect that with the aid of the new advancements the climate change can be if not totally stopped at least reduced, and contribute to the green economy that Europe aims for. The paper introduces the novel technologies that can support sustainability of manufacturing and industry at large, and proposes an architecture to bind together said technologies to realise the vision of Maintenance 4.0.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Intelligent decision support for maintenance: an overview and future trends

The changing nature of manufacturing, in recent years, is evident in industry’s willingness to adopt network-connected intelligent machines in their factory development plans. A number of joint corporate/government initiatives also describe and encourage the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the operation and management of production lines. Machine learning will have a significant role to play in the delivery of automated and intelligently supported maintenance decision-making systems. While e-maintenance practice provides aframework for internet-connected operation of maintenance practice the advent of IoT has changed the scale of internetworking and new architectures and tools are needed. While advances in sensors and sensor fusion techniques have been significant in recent years, the possibilities brought by IoT create new challenges in the scale of data and its analysis. The development of audit trail style practice for the collection of data and the provision of acomprehensive framework for its processing, analysis and use should be avaluable contribution in addressing the new data analytics challenges for maintenance created by internet connected devices. This paper proposes that further research should be conducted into audit trail collection of maintenance data, allowing future systems to enable ‘Human in the loop’ interactions

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications