Increasing competition in the current market situation in most industrial sectors demand increasing cost efficiency, safety and reliability in the development, operation and maintenance of technical systems.
- Considerable costs, manpower, time and materials are spent for solving and avoiding problems and failures in operation. In direct operation, appropriate actions have to be taken immediately to solve problems and failures to a degree that operation can be continued without delay and unacceptable loss of safety and reliability.
- The direct and indirect effects of malfunctioning stretch far beyond reduced operational functionality, down-time and material losses. Indirectly, repair teams have to be organised, maintenance schedules adjusted and systems redesigned. Most efforts is spent in these supporting operations.
- The increasing overall safety and reliability of technical industries will improve the associated public image, for example by reducing the number of delays of trains (think of loss of customer confidence) or reduction of down-time of production facilities.
Safety, reliability and life-cycle costs of technical systems is directly determined by
efficiency in fault diagnosis throughout the life-cycle.
The BRIDGE project's aim is to significantly improve diagnosis efficiency in operations and reduce the efforts required in supporting actions.
Improved efficiency in operational diagnosis implies:
- Significant increase of automation level for diagnosis of occurring failures and problems.
- Significant increase in coverage of failures and problems by tuning of symptoms and additional tests.
- Incorporate accurate and up-to-date information from supporting operations into the diagnosis.
- Fast and guaranteed response from the diagnosis systems.
- Present actions to solve or reduce the failure and subsequent failures, or
- present additional tests to identify further action.
- Actions and tests are appropriate for current operational mode and operator level.
Improved efficiency and coverage of operational diagnosis will reduce the number of unresolved failures and the demand on supporting operations. This process is not restricted to real-time monitoring during operations of the technical system. Operators, supervisors, engineers, and managers in system's development, repair shops, maintenance and engineering departments also perform different diagnoses on the same technical system. Modern technical applications change in their behaviour over time, for example due to changes in raw materials, wear out, equipment modifications or rescheduled maintenance. In all supporting operations, similar problems are solved repeatedly and efforts unnecesary spent. Too often, no lessons are learned from each diagnosis and action, due the hampering exchange of information. Unambiguous and automated exchange of this vital information is essential.
Efficiency of supporting operations can be further improved by:
- Uniform data representation to remove any barriers in the exchange of information gathered during operation and supporting operations.
- Simplified declaration of operational and technical knowledge about large technical applications.
- Simplified maintenance of all related diagnosis systems.
- Simplified and unambiguous exchange of technical knowledge and operational experience.
Target Market
The BRIDGE Product
