Knowledge-Intensive Decision Support System for Manufacturing Equipment Maintenance

Abstract

To ensure continuous production in industrial plants, the high valued manufacturing eqipments should be kept in good working conditions. This brings plants to search for means to control and reduce equipment failures. When faults emerge in plants, appropriate actions for fault diagnosis and reparation must be executed promptly and effectively to prevent large costs due to breakdowns. To provide reliable and effective maintenance support, the aid of advanced decision support technology utilizing previous repair experience is of crucial importance for the expert operators as it provides them valuable troubleshooting clues for new faults. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology, particularly, knowledge-based approach is promising for this domain. It captures efficiency of problem solving expertise from the domain experts; guides the expert operators in rapid fault detection and maintenance. This paper focuses on the design and development of a Knowledge-Intensive Decision Support System (KI-DSS) for Manufacturing Equipment Maintenance in industrial plants to support better maintenance decision and improve maintenance efficiency. With integration of casebased Reasoning and ontology, the KiDSS not only carries out data matching retrieval, but also performs semantic associated data access which is important for intelligent knowledge retrieval in decision support system. A case is executed to illustrate the use of the proposed KI-DSS to show the feasibility of our ap proach and the benefit of the ontology support.