Experiences in Developing Predictive Maintenance Solutions

Abstract

In industrial manufacturing environments, a regular maintenance is crucial to ensure the production efficiency, since the occurrence of unexpected disturbances leads to a degradation of the system performance, causing the loss of productivity and business opportunities. In this context, the purpose of predictive maintenance has been receiving increasingly more attention, which when well performed, can be a strategic factor in achieving corporate goals. The predictive maintenance, framed as an important issue in Industry 4.0, is able to anticipate problems or emergencies before they happen, bringing huge advantages to industries that allow them to optimize their results and obtain greater efficiency and profitability of equipment. For that reason, more and more Companies are understanding that the equipment conservation and conditionbased maintenance can contribute to increase their competitiveness. This paper focuses on the topic of predictive maintenance, its benefits, applications and challenges, complemented with the description of predictive maintenance applications, illustrated with two examples of real- world applications resulting from the experiences of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) and the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB) in previous R&D projects.