Wireless devices and systems have been deployed in many communication sectors but have not yet been adequately adapted to harsh industrial environments. Cost effective, reliable and scalable wireless technologies have yet to be introduced in industrial plants, including petroleum plants. At this time, there are very few, if any, cost-effective Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) radios available th...

In this paper we discuss interesting developments of expert systems for machine diagnosis and condition-based maintenance. We review some elements of condition-based maintenance and its applications, expert systems for machine diagnosis, and an example of machine diagnosis. In the last section we note some problems to be resolved so that expert systems for machine diagnosis may gain wider accep...

This paper presents a bearing run-to-failure data simulation model for condition based maintenance, in which a single point outrace fault can be implemented. According to the characteristic that bearings life follows the Weibull distribution, amount of bearing run-to-failure datasets can be simulated which can be used to verify the feature extraction, remaining useful life prediction and mainte...

The high costs in maintaining today’s complex and sophisticated equipment make it necessary to enhance modern maintenance management systems. Conventional condition-based maintenance (CBM) reduces the uncertainty of maintenance according to the needs indicated by the equipment condition. The intelligent predictive decision support system (IPDSS) for condition-based maintenance (CBM) supplements...

Condition-based maintenance has been proven effective in reducing unexpected failures with minimum operational costs. This study considers an optimal condition-based replacement policy with optimal inspection interval when the degradation conforms to an inverse Gaussian process with random effects. The random effects parameter is used to account for heterogeneities commonly observed among a pro...

Emergence of uniquely addressable embeddable devices has raised the bar on Telematics capabilities. Though the technology itself is not new, its application has been quite limited until now. Sensor based telematics technologies generate volumes of data that are orders of magnitude larger than what operators have dealt with previously. Real-time big data computation capabilities have opened the ...

In order to perform Preventive Maintenance (PM), two approaches have evolved in the literature. The traditional approach is based on the use of statistical and reliability analysis of equipment failure. Under statistical-reliability (S-R)-based PM, the objective of achieving the minimum total cost is pursued by establishing fixed PM intervals, which are statistically optimal, at which to replac...

The development of structural health monitoring (SHM) technology has evolved for over fifteen years in Hong Kong since the implementation of the “Wind And Structural Health Monitoring System (WASHMS)” on the suspension Tsing Ma Bridge in 1997. Five cable-supported bridges in Hong Kong, namely the Tsing Ma (suspension) Bridge, the Kap Shui Mun (cable-stayed) Bridge, the Ting Kau (cable-stayed) B...

This thesis deals with the reliability and maintenance of structures that are damaged by shocks arriving randomly in time. The degradation is modeled as a cumulative stochastic point process. Previous studies mostly adopted expected cost rate criterion for optimizing the maintenance policies, which ignores practical implications of discounting of maintenance cost over the life cycle of the syst...

Preliminary notes Machines undergo degradation as a result of both technical factors and non-technical factors that increase the potential for failures and deteriorate their health condition, and there is growing interest in new methods for health condition assessment. Currently, the inherent health of a machine is evaluated by monitoring of the data acquired by sensors. In other words, the evo...