Predictive maintenance techniques are recognized as an
integral part of instructional decision-making. Condition-based
maintenance is a methodology that combines predictive and
preventive maintenance with real-time monitoring. The goal of
predictive maintenance is to optimize reliability and
availability by determining the need for maintenance activities
based on equipment condition. Condition monitoring involves
fault diagnosis and condition prognosis and looks at the system
and all of its assets. Predictive maintenance strives to identify
incipient faults before they become critical. Therefore,
predictive maintenance could be considered as a decision
making strategy enabling real-time diagnosis of impending
failures and prognosis of future equipment health, where the
decision to perform maintenance is reached by observing the
“condition” of the system and its components. This process
requires technologies, expert knowledge, and communication
to integrate all available equipment condition data, such as:
diagnostic and performance data; maintenance histories;
operator logs; and design data, to make timely decisions about
the maintenance requirements of major/critical equipment.
The management of particular system can be realized by
collecting information about the system, defining the
objectives of its management, formulating of appropriate task
for a decision making, solving this problem, implementation of
the decision, assessment of its effectiveness and interactive
influence of the decision-maker during various stages. The
corresponding methodology is proposed in Fig. 1.
Condition monitoring is an essential part of predictive
maintenance where the condition of specific equipment is
monitored. This can be done automatically with the use of
proper sensors or manually. During the stage 1, phase 1a of the
methodology implementation, quantitative information about
the investigated system is collected by means of sensors. For
example, the frequency of the vibrations can be mapped since
certain frequencies will only be present when conditions that
indicate an impending defect are present. Equipment can be
monitored using sophisticated instrumentation such as
vibration analysis equipment or the expert senses. Therefore,
phase 1b collects information from professionals serving the
system and experts to ensure additional knowledge from
human information.