Maintenance support systems (MSS) monitoring conditions of facilities are indispensable for condition-based maintenance. A sensor network is used to acquire maintenance data in the MSS, and installation of the sensor network should be simple and easy to execute maintenance tasks in a cost-effective way. Therefore, this report sets a proposal of an autonomous configuration function of the systems that makes the installation simple and easy. This function is composed of wireless sensor networks, plugand-play function configuring software modules, and cooperative procedure between them. This paper also shows evaluations of the proposed function that is feasible for practical maintenance work. The evaluations have been carried out using a prototype system implementing the elements of the proposed function. K E Y W O R D S facilities maintenance, plug-and-play, wireless sensor network Electron Comm Jpn. 2019;102:21-29.This section discusses the advanced functions of the proposed automatic setting based on the experimental results; specifically, the authors consider 1 ○ how maintenance data sent from already activated sensor nodes affect time needed by newly activated nodes to begin measurement (i.e., influence on maintenance data communications), and 2 ○ extensibility of sensor nodes.
Influence of maintenance data communicationAs shown in Section 3.3, the more frequently sound data were transmitted, and the longer time was needed for sensor nodes to begin measurement. However, when sound data were frequently transmitted by two nodes, measurement did not start even after 10 min in some cases. On the other hand, conditions to begin measurement were often observed when there were periods, even though very short, free of sound data transmission.How to cite this article: Otani T, Miyashita M, Kurono M, Ishihara Y, Tanaka T, Nakajima T. A sensor network for substation facility maintenance without device configurations. Electron Comm Jpn.