A Process-Centric View on Predictive Maintenance and Fleet Prognostics

In the age of digitalization and the fourth industrial revolution, predictive maintenance is becoming increasingly important as a proactive maintenance type. Despite the economic benefits that predictive maintenance generates for companies, its practical application is still in its early stages. This is often due to two prevailing challenges. First, there is a deficiency of knowledge about predictive maintenance and its concrete realization. Second, there is a lack of high quality and rich data of historical machine failures. To increase the representativeness of data, data from several similar machines (i. ,e. a fleet) should be considered.

To foster the effective implementation of predictive maintenance, supportive guidance in the realization of a predictive maintenance project is needed. For this reason, this dissertation presents a process reference model and a development method for fleet prognostics. The process reference model describes a comprehensive and application-independent view of the complete predictive maintenance process. The model is supplemented by the fleet prognostic development method. To address the specific characteristics of the fleet, a systematic process is depicted which provides a means to assess the heterogeneity of the fleet from a data-driven perspective and simplifies the design of an algorithm considering fleet data. Finally, the applicability and value of the research results are demonstrated with three industrial cases