Maintaining manufacturing and process equipment is always a delicate balance between preventative maintenance and repairing faults after they occur.Spare parts and maintenance staff pay is a substantial cost. Most manufacturers engage in preventive maintenance programmes. This usually implies a mixture of following guidelines from equipment manufacturers and the experience of the maintenance staff. Preventative maintenance comes at a cost too, but this needs to be compared to the consequences of letting a piece of equipment go unmaintained.

A business needs to avoid its main manufacturing process being down – losses of revenue per day (or even per hour) rack up very quickly.Modern process equipment typically comes complete with many fault sensors and even remote engineer access via the internet. However, these sensors only report reasons for faults after they occur, i.e.they feed back information. An article in The Economist reports on research being conducted at the University of Portsmouth. The research centres on the idea of a ‘virtual engineer’. The idea is that a sensor can spot tell-tale signs of likely failure in electrical equipment. This could mean that preventive maintenance happens less frequently as equipment may be perfectly fine beyond its normal maintenance period.The virtual engineer is thus acting as a feed-forward control measure, as it is measuring the performance of electrical components and trying to predict if they will fail.

Questions 

1 Why is the type of predictive control mentioned above superior? List some reasons why.

2 What kinds of cost savings may be possible with a system like a ‘virtual engineer’?