Conception of a prototype to validate a maintenance expert system

Decision making is crucial for the life of many production plants. Good decision need the right information at the right time, and a deep knowledge of the system. This is especially true for older plants that are more prone to failures. Unfortunately, these systems are less rich of monitoring and diagnostics instrumentation, because of their seniority. When the maintenance service is carried out by a group of external companies, they suffer the consequences of backwardness of the equipment, having to deal with problems of poor coordination, delays in interventions and so on. Small and medium enterprises are often in trouble facing these issues so they need dedicated resources in order to offer a maintenance service compliant to the costumer requirements. In this context a research project was funded, aiming at aiding the birth of a virtual enterprise network of maintainers, which should provide a maintenance service of the highest level in the field of legacy industrial plants. One of the most difficult steps of the project, was to design a prototype capable of testing the architecture of the virtual network, the expert system and the overall goodness of the proposal for potential customers. In this paper we describe how it was possible to design, produce and operate a prototype which could fit a virtual enterprise network of maintainers. The method requires, among other things, to fulfil a preliminary selective Failure Modes and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA) to be properly used to implement the