A cloud-based approach for maintenance of machine tools and equipment based on shop-floor monitoring

Maintenance and its cost continue, over the years, to draw the attention of production management since the unplanned failures decrease the reliability of the system and also the return of investments. Advanced maintenance techniques that capture and process shop-floor information can reduce costs and increase the sustainability of an enterprise. This paper presents a condition-based preventive maintenance approach integrated into a machine monitoring framework. The latter acquires data from shop-floor machine tools and analyses them through an information fusion technique to support the condition-based preventive maintenance operations. The proposed approach is developed into a software service, deployed on a Cloud environment. The service gathers and processes data, such as their actual processing time and machining time per tool, related to the operation of machine tools and equipment and calculates the expected remaining useful life of components. Moreover, it provides notifications to machine tool operators and maintenance departments, as well as it enables the communication among them using mobile technology. The framework is applied to a case study with data obtained from a machining SME. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.