Automated material handling systems in complex manufacturing plants oftentimes exhibit, possibly transient, tailback phenomena, which reduce a production line's throughput. In order to identify origins and causes of observed tailbacks, historic event log data of loads passing certain waypoints has to be inspected. This paper introduces an approach to automatically carry out transient tailback recognition and cause identification. The approach is based on analysis of holding times and capacities of transport segments. As a result, complete lists of tailbacks and affected segments are provided. Each tailback consists of a reconstructed queue of loads waiting for preceding loads. For each tailback an initial cause event is determined. Additionally, identified tailbacks can be ranked by length or by impact on the transport delays. The developed demonstrator frees the user from time consuming visual inspection of log files by providing clearly represented complete tailback information instead.

Future supermarkets will provide instrumented shopping carts, shelves and products so that large amounts of event data of customer's actions inside the store will be recorded.

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In order to guarantee high operational availability, the modular industrial equipment requires frequent maintenance, which oftentimes is carried out by the manufacturer. Reports about service technician's activities are stored in maintenance histories. Manufacturers of such equipment would benefit significantly from analysis of recorded maintenance and fault histories for planning of maintenance activities, offering scalable service contracts and finding reasons for product faults. This paper introduces a methodology that supports the interpretation of the maintenance histories to allow the manufacturers the analysis and optimization of maintenance operations. The methodology interprets the maintenance histories as sequences of events, containing meaningful patterns. Tailored data mining algorithms are applied, that provide causality details going beyond the results of standard techniques. The paper uses the example of maintenance reports of gas analytic equipment.