Towards an Open-standards based Framework for achieving Condition-based Predictive Maintenance (Research Paper)

The advent of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology has significantly optimized the industrial operations management by connecting industrial assets with information systems and, hence, with business processes. The IIoT forms the backbone for materializing the Industry 4.0 initiative. Actionable insights obtained from industrial analytics are one of the pivotal means for achieving intelligent operations and maintenance. Intelligence refers to making optimal decisions for both automated and human-in-the-loop decision making. Condition-based predictive maintenance (CBPdM), also known as Maintenance 4.0, is among the major focus points of the Industry 4.0 and IIoT.

The industry is moving forward at a fast pace to reap the benefits of the Industry 4.0 revolution, but unfortunately standards bodies have not been able to keep up with this pace. Standards form the basis for introducing new technologies and innovations, ensuring that the products, components and services supplied by different companies are mutually compatible. Open standards are publicly available standards which are easy to adopt and improve upon. Even after the wider adoption of CBPdM in industry, to the best of our knowledge there does not exist any standard framework or reference architecture for it.

The research team at University of South Australia along with MIMOSA has published a research paper discussing the existing standards related to condition-based maintenance and the potential of the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem (OIIE), a MIMOSA led initiative, as a framework which extends previous open standards for achieving CBPdM. MIMOSA has a history of developing and publishing open systems architecture for condition-based maintenance (CBM) and enterprise application integration (EAI). The OIIE framework for CBPdM is built upon these well-adopted open-standards and extends them to utilize the potential offered by IIoT and Industry 4.0.

Read the complete research paper here to know how the OIIE framework addresses the requirements of Industry 4.0 and CBPdM.
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Published October 2018.