A Knowledge Acquisition and Management System for Fault Diagnosis and Maintenance of Equipments

Equipment maintenance is one of the essential tasks for manufacturing industries. There have been a number of information systems developed to cope with equipment malfunctions. Most fault diagnosis systems are applications of expert systems which have two drawbacks with regard to knowledge acquisition. One is the lack of knowledge continuity; the other is the limited source of knowledge being incapable of combining knowledge of entire workforce. In this study, we propose an equipment maintenance decision support system architecture with a flexible knowledge maintenance methodology. A case implementation to a sewage management company with multiple distributed plants is introduced to show that the proposed approach helps more efficient utilization of experience-based knowledge in maintaining equipments. Key-Words: Knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, equipment maintenance, decision support, computer-supported cooperative work