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A systematic approach for predictive maintenance service design:

Methodology and applications

Article  in  International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services · January 2009

DOI: 10.1504/IJIMS.2009.031341

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Int. J. of Internet-based Manufacturing Services (IJIMS) , Vol. x, No. x, xxxx 1

A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design:

Methodology and Applications
Jay Lee*
Ohio Eminent Scholar and L.W. Scott Alter Chair Professor
Director of the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS)
University of Cincinnati
PO Box 210072, Cincinnati, OH 45221
Email: jay.lee@uc.edu
*Corresponding Author
Yan Chen
Hassan Al-Atat
Mohamed AbuAli
Edzel Lapira
Graduate Research Assistants
Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS)
University of Cincinnati
PO Box 210072, Cincinnati, OH 45221

Abstract:
Maintenance has always been considered as a service required during the middle-of-life period of a
product in order to sustain its working condition and to extend its functional life. The ongoing
evolution of products into more complex systems, the increase in customer expectations, the
abundance of data available for, and the increase of computational abilities in, products have lead
to the realization that maintenance is no longer an aftermarket service needed for product
functionality but rather an inherent service function of the product. This paper addresses how
maintenance can be transformed from pure "strategies" into "a service function". A state-of-the-art
review on maintenance design is conducted, and then a methodology and tools for effect predictive
maintenance service design are presented. Two applications in the areas of closed-loop product life
cycle management, and factory energy management, are discussed.
Keywords: Predictive Maintenance; Service Design; Prognostics
Reference to this paper should be made as: Lee, J., Yan, C., Al-Atat, H., and AbuAli, M., and
Lapira, E. (2009) ‘A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design:
Methodology and Applications’, Int. J. Internet Manufacturing Services (IJIMS), Vol. X, No. X.
Biographical Notes:
Dr. Jay Lee is Ohio Eminent Scholar and L.W. Scott Alter Chair Professor in Advanced
Manufacturing at the Univ. of Cincinnati and is founding director of National Science Foundation
(NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) on Intelligent Maintenance
Systems (IMS www.imscenter.net) which is a multi-campus NSF Center of Excellence between the
Univ. of Cincinnati (lead institution), the Univ. of Michigan, and the Univ. of Missouri-Rolla in
partnerships with over 45 global companies including P&G, Toyota, GE Aviation, Boeing, AMD,
Caterpillar, Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, ETAS, Festo, Harley-Davidson, Honeywell, ITRI (Taiwan),
Komatsu (Japan), Omron (Japan), Samsung (Korea), Toshiba (Japan), Bosch, Parker Hannifin,
BorgWarner, Spirit AeroSystems, Nissan (Japan), Syncrude (Canada), and McKinsey & Company,
CISCO, TARDEC, etc. His current research focuses on autonomic computing, embedded IT and
smart prognostics technologies, design of smart self-maintenance machines & systems, and
dominant design tools for product and service innovation.

Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Jay Lee et al. 2

1. Introduction
Maintenance has always been considered as a service required during the middle-of-
life period of a product in order to sustain its working condition and to extend its
functional life. Although maintenance is essential, and sometimes mandatory, it has
always been considered to be a distinct service; not as an integral element of a product.
This is why maintenance service has always been considered to be an aftermarket support
function.
Products, however, have dramatically evolved from pure mechanical systems or pure
electrical systems in the early 1900s, to Mechatronic systems after 1969 (Robert B.,
2005). Current products on the market are comprised of a complex integration of
mechanical, electrical and information systems. This rapid evolution in products has
brought about a significant increase in maintenance requirements and complexity, and
can be summarized as follows:
• Products are more complex than ever and so is their maintenance.
The complexity of current and future products is greatly reflected in their maintenance
needs. When a product fails, it may be because of a mechanical component failure, an
electronic component failure, a failure of the interaction between these various
components, and so on. Maintenance of such products that are comprised of systems-of-
systems cannot be based solely on trial-and-error, fault-tree checklists, predefined
maintenance schedules, or engineering experience.
• Rapid evolution of products has increased customers’ expectations of products.
While traditionally, companies have been employing different fire-fighting approaches in
order to supply cheap and reliable products by decreasing their manufacturing costs and
increasing their quality standards; customers are looking beyond that. Increasing
customer expectations have transformed the market into a very competitive arena
consisting of niche products; products that are functional out-of-the-box and service-
centered, in that they can deliver services to customers beyond traditional expectations
with minimal need of customer intervention during their middle-of-life period.
• Products are becoming more capable and so is their maintenance.
Recent technological developments in the field of electronics have resulted in cheaper
and more powerful electronic systems that are able to be used with, and embedded in,
mechanical systems. The functionality of most products currently on the market is
dependent on embedded sensors and embedded controllers. Therefore, current and future
products generate and make use of an abundant amount of data. The availability of real-
time embedded data, and the ability to cheaply capture and process this data within a
product itself, enables more capable maintenance services. With sensors, a product’s
behavior or performance can be monitored; with embedded processors, data analysis can
be conducted autonomously to generate timely information concerning the health status
of a product; and, with intelligent algorithms running on these processors, product failure
can be predicted, and ultimately prevented.
The ongoing evolution of products into more complex systems, the increase in
customer expectations, the abundance of data available for, and the increase of
computational abilities in, products have lead to the realization that maintenance is no
longer an aftermarket service needed for product functionality but rather an inherent
service function of the product and thus the emergence of the “maintenance service
function”. This paper addresses how maintenance can be transformed from pure
"strategies" into "a service function". Maintenance should be redefined as: a productivity
improvement methodology; a failure diagnosing, predict and prevent methodology; an
A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 3

enabler of precision information flow for problem locating and solving, as well as an
enabler of product closed-loop life cycle design through information feedback to
designers, in order to redesign and improve product performance.
2. State-of-the-Art Review on Maintenance Design
2.1 Review of Maintenance Strategies
In the past, maintenance was conducted using only one strategy: “fail and fix,” also
referred to as reactive maintenance. Such a strategy is acceptable only when the damage
to equipment is not critical, and copious amounts of downtime will not have a dramatic
impact on overall operations or costs. However, in situations in which such parameters
are of great important, as they are in most modern industries, a more proactive
maintenance strategy is necessary.
Proactive Maintenance, generally, is any planned task or activity to prevent
equipment failure. There are two main maintenance strategies that are considered as
proactive; Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Predictive Maintenance (PdM).
Preventive Maintenance is a maintenance strategy based on scheduled overhaul or
scheduled part replacement, on a fixed interval, regardless of the actual condition of the
equipment (William C. W.,). There are two levels of PM called Minor PM, which is
simple equipment or facilities essential service actions to ensure the normal operation of
the equipment, and Major PM, which provides inspection, detection and correction of
incipient failure (Hai, Q. and Jay, L., 2007). However, simply scheduling maintenance
without considering operating conditions, environmental conditions, system interaction
complexity, among other factors, is not efficient and will interrupt normal operation,
resulting in unnecessary downtime.
Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is a right-on-time maintenance strategy. Predictive
maintenance may be best described as a process which requires technologies and expert
knowledge in the use of all available diagnostic and performance data, maintenance
history, operator logs and design data to make timely decisions about maintenance
requirements of major/critical equipment. The basis of predictive maintenance is
Condition-based Maintenance (CBM). Most recently, in many vital areas of
manufacturing, CBM has been integrated in activities such as vibration analysis, lubricant
contaminant analysis and process performance monitoring, by using information infusion
techniques with multi-parameter measurements. Some CBM techniques have become the
standard in many industries.
2.2 E-Manufacturing and E-Maintenance Concepts
Both Reactive Maintenance and Preventive maintenance have severe limitations.
Reactive maintenance leads to high production costs and significant equipment
downtime. Preventive Maintenance is intended to eliminate equipment or process
breakdowns and downtime by scheduling maintenance operations, regardless of the
actual state of the machine or process. Preventative maintenance intervals are determined
using reliability theory and information about the machine or process life cycle. This
practice often results in an unnecessary loss of productivity either because maintenance is
performed when the process or machine is still functioning at an acceptable level or
because unpredicted breakdowns occur before scheduled maintenance operations are
performed. According to a recent study by Forbes Magazine, one out of every three
dollars spent on preventive maintenance is wasted. In the study, a major overhaul facility
reports that “60% of hydraulic pumps sent in for rebuild had nothing wrong with them.”
These inefficiencies are the result of maintenance performed in accordance with a
Jay Lee et al. 4

schedule as opposed to the machine’s true condition and need. Therefore, in

contemporary markets, it becomes increasingly important to predict and prevent failures
based on the current and past behavior of the equipment, thus ensuring that maintenance
is carried out only when needed and exactly when needed. (Hai, Q. and Jay, L., 2007)
E-manufacturing has been developed to meet the needs of e-business practices. It
leverages the Internet and web-enable technologies. E-manufacturing integrates
information and knowledge from plant floor assets, suppliers, upper level enterprise
applications, and market customers (Lee, J., 2003 Dec). The utilization of information
integration has many different purposes. Plant floor asset monitoring can be used to
schedule maintenance and order supplies, in real-time. Information exchanges among
manufacturing, customer relationship management and supply chain management within
a company, may lead to customer order execution on the plant floor and across the supply
chain, which will speed up production process with flexibility and visibility. Information
transparency and seamless exchange processes are guaranteed benefits of the integration
of e-manufacturing. Intelligent remote monitoring, publishing and e-supply networks
help to implement the links with all enterprise operation and asset optimization (Lee, J.,
2003) Therefore innovative intelligence in the entire manufacturing system would be
integrated to realize near-zero downtime, improve product quality and increase overall
productivity.
However, current enterprise resource planning systems do not consider the instability
of plant floor production processes, which is caused by unscheduled maintenance,
unexpected downtime, variability and reliability of suppliers and customers. E-
maintenance, however, takes these factors into account. As a matter of fact, in many
plants and factory floors, sophisticated sensors and devices with appropriate
computational capabilities have been installed; even some system applications have been
used to collect data and information from the work station, and monitor production
processes. Although they are capable of delivering data or machine status, most of them
have not generated practical information which can be utilized in different manufacturing
execution systems and aide in to executing resource planning. Since available data is not
automatically rendered in a useable form, this creates an opportunity for a new E-
maintenance generation.
2.3 Unmet Needs and Gaps in Maintenance
More industrial manufacturers are starting to perceive the shift in the trend of current
business models towards being service-oriented rather than product-centric. More
emphasis has been placed on establishing and maintaining a relationship with customers
through broader service offerings, in addition to the product itself. It is a unique service
package accompanying a core product that differentiates the competitive manufacturers
in the marketplace. The service becomes an added value to the product, which renders
cheaper copies obsolete since they do not include the extra services. Currently, product
services expand to all activities throughout a product’s life cycle, including required
production supplies, financing and maintenance (Lee, J., AbuAli, M., 2009). However,
conventional and reactive services are not enough to maintain a competitive advantage in
the market. Smarter services are needed to imbue intelligence into products and maintain
a competitive edge. Intelligent maintenance systems are one type of smart services that
enable products or machine floor level customers to achieve smart e-service. Figure 1
describes the system elements of an intelligent e-maintenance system.
In general, current practices in maintenance design still have gaps in different aspects
of manufacturing. These gaps are discussed as follows:
A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 5

• Gap in Product Usage:

Several business models currently add smart services into their product design. GM
vehicle telemetry and OnStar are smart services that have the ability to organize crash
data to help experts diagnose the type and severity of an impact a vehicle has
experienced. GE Energy also offers an intelligent service by providing 24-hour
monitoring and response to help isolate problems via remote monitoring, make repairs,
and offer preventive maintenance activities to provide customers with peace of mind.
However, the concepts of intelligent maintenance services are still in their infancy and
have not been realized by most of manufacturers. (Glen Allmendinger, Ralph
Lombreglia, 2005)
• Gap in Production Efficiency:
Current traditional methods, such as the Toyota Production System (TPS), are people-
centric. This implies that the success the company relies on is the discipline, expertise
and experience of its labor force. As a consequence, there are issues that arise from such
a practice; inability to standardize intangibles (discipline and experience), and loss of
people due to attrition (expertise).
• Gap in Information Management:
Factory floors employ many types of processes, machines and sensor data. Most
companies are using SPC (statistic process control) and 7QC tools for managing data and
identifying process problems. There is no systematic tool to organize all these data in a
structured way to obtain timely, actionable information that can instantly support decision
making. Currently, maintenance design is treated as a problem solving paradigm rather
than a service function.
• Gaps in Product Life Cycle Management:
Closed-loop product life cycle management (PLM) is an enhancement tool for business
models. The purpose of PLM is to provide the best balance between customer
satisfaction, corporate profits, and environmental friendliness (Takataa et. al, 2004). PLM
requires high-level coordination and integration of information throughout the product
life cycle. However, there is no sufficient data collected concerning the product after it is
sold to the customer. This gap in information flow between product manufacturers and
customers prevents valuable information about the performance of the product in the field
from being used by the product designers as feedback to close the loop of PLM (Lee, J.,
AbuAli, M., 2009).
3. Methodology for Predictive Maintenance Service Design
3.1 Systematic Approach
With increasing customer expectations for products, and in order to provide more
value to fend off competition, the traditional fire-fighting maintenance strategy has
become unacceptable. What is needed rather is a systematic maintenance design and
service business which is capable of adapting to the changes in customer expectations,
the increase in market competition and the evolution of current enabling technologies.
Identifying service needs for customers or a company and translating them into clear
maintenance requirements are the basis of the methodology proposed in this paper
(Figure 3). Maintenance is no longer viewed as a solution to a problem but rather a
transformation in the company’s view of the nature and function of maintenance by
enabling its assets and products with predictive maintenance services.
Jay Lee et al. 6

Step 1: Problem Formulation

The first challenge in bringing about this transformation is determining and
understanding the current needs and issues of a particular company, which are usually
shaped by the nature of the company’s assets or the company’s products. A company can
therefore implement a tailor made predictive maintenance service that addresses its
unique issues in order to improve its assets’ uptime, prevent asset failures, improve
productivity and have a better information flow throughout its various business units. If a
company implements a predictive maintenance service for its products then it can achieve
two things: firstly, the company’s products will be enhanced with new service functions
that can lead to improvements in uptime, failure prevention, productivity, and
information flow for its customers; secondly, the company’s product can benefit from the
information feedback in-order to enhance the design and development of its future
version or what is called a closed-loop product design. Some of the service needs that
can be satisfied through integrating predictive maintenance services are as follows:

1. Service for Uptime: once it is possible to predict when a product will fail, this
information can be utilized to better schedule maintenance and operations in order to
eliminate unscheduled downtime, and thus maximize equipment uptime.
2. Service for Failure Prevention: with the ability to infer what failure mode that a
component is going to experience in the event of a system breakdown, catastrophic
failures can be prevented. Products are complex systems of interacting components;
when one component fails, this will most likely lead to the failure of the components
interacting with it. So, it is very important to identify and predict the failure at the
source before it causes detrimental damage that may not be solved by typical repair,
and may prove to be more costly.
3. Service for System Streamlining: a product that is continuously monitored and
intelligently maintained, based on predictive maintenance techniques, is less
vulnerable to operational abuse and will have a longer functional-life.
4. Service for Productivity Improvement: the goal of any enterprise is to ensure
productivity through the availability of assets and their readiness for operation. A
well designed and implemented Predictive and Preventive Maintenance strategy for
an enterprise can improve overall productivity, in that it can reduce downtime costs,
improve quality, reduce energy consumption of assets, improve safety, enable better
control of business processes and reduce management uncertainty.
5. Service for Information Management: assessing and predicting the health of a
product needs to be complemented with a framework that is capable of delivering the
right information to the right people at the right time.
6. Service for Closed-loop Life Cycle Product Management: with increasing global
competition, products are pushed to the market at break-neck speeds in order to
minimize the time-to-market of new products, to gain new market shares and
ultimately, to increase profits. The beginning-of-life phase of new products,
including design, development and validation, are gradually decreasing, and thus the
data and information generated by an intelligent maintenance system through the
middle-of-life phase render valuable insights into the product and can lead to major
future product enhancements and upgrades if fed back to the design phase.

Service needs should also be translated into intelligent maintenance requirements.

For example, if the service need is to reduce downtime for a critical component in a
machine, prognostics functionality will be needed to estimate the remaining useful life.
A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 7

However, for equipment with failing components that are easier to fix or replace, then
root cause identification and accurate prediction can help locate the problem in advance,
thus avoiding undesired influence on product quality. In other cases, the service need is
for overall productivity improvement, so a system-level health monitoring solution is
needed to generate a current system health index to provide information to higher
business level. Service requirements can be categorized into three types: root-cause
analysis, condition based maintenance and prognostics. Root-cause analysis will help
identify failure modes and their criticality, based on productivity and product quality.
This requires knowledge contribution from domain expertise, reliability specialists and
equipment designers. Condition based maintenance will focus on identified failure
modes to monitor system health, and evaluate if system performance is reliable enough to
assure that product quality is within acceptable tolerances. Finally, prognostics is geared
towards the deployment of intelligent algorithms for modeling fault initiation and growth
mechanism in order to predict system or component degradation. The degradation
evaluation can be used to make decisions for optimizing maintenance scheduling or
establish alarm functions based on system fault tolerance limitation to raise alarm in right
time to right person.
Step 2: Abstraction Level and Performance Metrics Identification
In this stage there are three tasks. First, the level of implementation of the intelligent
maintenance system should be identified, whether it is component-level, machine-level or
fleet-level (group of machines). To illustrate, consider a CNC machine, with the use of
maintenance data, a company was able to determine that spindle bearing is the most
critical component. Next, the company has to prioritize the asset (whether it is a
machining center, turning machine, grinder, etc.) with the identified critical component.
The second task involves putting a focus on the type of failure mode that will be tracked
by the prognostics system. It would be a major undertaking, though ideal, to monitor as
much failure modes that the critical component may experience, but the company has at
least to know either the failure mode that gives the highest downtime (either due to high
frequency or long average downtime) or highest associated downtime cost (due to long
lead time, expensive parts and labor, etc.) The third task is to choose performance
metrics; the observable measurement of asset performance. Actually the company uses
the performance metrics to estimate the influence or impact of the different failure modes
identified in the in second task. A 4-Quadrant chart has been developed (Figure 2) to
establish the relationship between frequency of failure and downtime impact from
different failure modes. Aside from machine downtime as a primary performance metric,
companies have also used product quality or dimensional tolerances.
Step 3: Prognostic Method Selection
Next, details of the critical failure modes of the target asset(s) should be investigated.
Several factors are involved in such an investigation including: the physics-based
principles of failure, material and component conditions, measurable symptoms, and
availability of historical data for these failure modes. Proper examination of these factors
will lead to the choice of the prognostic techniques that are going to be employed: model
based, data-driven or hybrid. Component failure prediction is more specific and practical
enough for a failure based stochastic model. In other cases, data-driven statistical
algorithms are used to predict correlation between system performance and failures given
certain confidence level.
Jay Lee et al. 8

Step 4: Measurement Selection and Sensor Strategy

Measurable variables should be selected for the purpose of generating relevant and
stable data for prognostic applications. The data collected would provide early indication
of the failure effect and magnitude. There are several issues that need to be addressed:
availability of sensors, the type of sensors, mounting and installation, quantity of sensors
and even the degradation of each sensor itself. There are also instances when data from
the machine controller (such as status flags, timing signals, etc.) are also required to
provide a more profound health assessment. This will generate another set of challenges,
such as controller communication, determining the protocols that have to be resolved and
synchronizing the controller information with the sensor measurement signals.
Step 5: Monitoring Strategy Evaluation
Details of the intelligent maintenance system need to be determined as part of
evaluating the monitoring strategy. Depending on the nature of the prognostic task, the
urgency of providing machine health information and its impact, different companies will
make varying strategy decisions. For example, there are instances when a monitoring
system does not need to be running all the time. Some data acquisition systems only need
to be triggered during a certain period of operation. Meanwhile, monitoring a continuous
production system (such as an assembly line) will require uninterrupted data collection.
Decisions also need to be made whether measurements should be taken while a machine
is operational (in-process) or when it is idle (out-of-process).
Step 6: Experimental Design Planning
The allocation of time and resources for conducting experiments should be
completed during the planning stage. If an adaptive model-based approach is employed,
using built-in sensors, this step should be completed without much difficulty. However, if
data-driven approaches are to be used, the user needs to set aside time and resources for
performing experiments and for data collection, with the purpose of: 1) validating
sensors; 2) establishing a baseline and fitting model and; 3) validating the complete e-
Maintenance system. These activities will require the machine to be monitored to go off-
line for a significant amount of time. This will be a major concern for companies whose
machines are very critical to their manufacturing operations and cannot afford to disturb
their production schedule.
Step 7: Solution Feasibility/Selection
There are other factors that can affect the design of an intelligent maintenance
system. Some of these include, but are not limited to, hardware selection, software
architecture, human-machine interface, and system connectivity.
With regard to hardware selection, the user has to be consulted as to whether they
have a preference for the type of DAQ system, processor unit, etc., that will be utilized. A
company may have strict rules concerning the use of standardized hardware modules, or
they might have a prior business agreement with a certain provider.
The software architecture is of great importance if the company requires an e-
Maintenance system module that can be used with their current monitoring system. This
will require the software to follow certain templates/formats and that it is able to
communicate with other modules, such as sensors and data acquisition devices.
The user interface should also allow customization, depending on the specific
requirements of the user of the system. A machine operator may just need simple health
indicators that will allow for deciding whether to run a machine or not. A maintenance
A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 9

crew, however, would be more interested in other health information that will enable
them to apply appropriate repair actions for a particular situation.
Connectivity is another important factor. The health information generated by the
system might be used for high-level systems, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) software. In this case, a mechanism should be designed so as to provide the health
information in a particular manner, and to a particular location. The incorporation of
communications standards should aide in ensuring that this is possible.
Step 8: Cost-Benefit Analysis
The cost of implementation is a major constraint, most especially if the user intends
to scale the use of the prognostics system to the factory level or duplicate the system on
similar machines. Costs considerations for such an implementation include: hardware and
software, testbeds and experiments and labor.
Furthermore, the cost of maintaining such a system, if it is adopted, should also be
considered into any cost estimations. In addition, users will have to ensure that they have
the manpower with the expertise to install (for migration purposes), operate and maintain
the system.
Although different companies will have different ways conducting a cost-benefit
analysis of implementing such a system, typically, the performance metric chosen earlier
is used to determine whether the profit generated from improved productivity or
improved product quality will outweigh the cost of implementing and maintaining the
system.
In some cases, more than one candidate solution can be provided, including different
hardware solutions and software architectures.
3.2 Tools
The Watchdog Agent® is a toolbox of algorithms for the assessment and prediction
of equipment performance, developed by the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems
(IMS) 1 . The most important feature of the Watchdog Agent® is its ability to transform
raw data into useful health information, and provide strong visualization tools that can aid
in the maintenance decision making process, as illustrated in Figure 4.
The Watchdog Agent® provides the tools necessary for designing a framework for
reconfigurable maintenance services. It has been designed as a modular toolbox with
open architecture which facilitates its use in different applications, industries,
environments, etc. The Watchdog Agent® tools can either be deployed in multiple
commercially available hardware solutions, or they can be embedded into the user’s
existing hardware, given the availability of a compatible environment and certain
computational requirements. The toolbox includes four functional modules: Signal
Processing & Feature Extraction, Health Assessment, Health diagnostics and
Performance Prediction, as shown in Figure 5.
The Signal Processing & Feature Extraction module provides signal processing
methods to process stationary and non-stationary signals. After de-noising, the critical
features from signals are extracted and then selected, either by using expert knowledge or
via automatic feature selection methods, to describe a system’s state. Algorithms that
comprise the Health Assessment module, which include statistical data classification and
clustering algorithms, are used to indentify different feature space indicating distinct fault
symptoms. The overall health of a system can be evaluated and visualized via health

1
NSF I/UCRC Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems, www.imscenter.net; 2004.
Jay Lee et al. 10

assessment methods. The Health Diagnostics module provides different methods for
identifying unknown correlations in the system in order to find the root causes of failure.
Tools in the performance predication module can be used to predict fault evolution when
combined with expert knowledge, physical stochastic models and statistical prediction.
In addition to the four functional modules, the Watchdog Agent® includes strong
visualization tools that display prognostics information to the user to facilitate the process
of maintenance decision making, as shown in Figure 6. One visualization tool is the radar
chart which is used for component health monitoring and can display to the maintenance
practitioner an overview of the health of individual components. Another tool is the
health map for pattern classification which is used to determine the root causes of
degradation or failure. This map displays different failure modes of the monitored
components by presenting these modes in clusters – each indicated by a different color.
The confidence value for performance degradation monitoring is another tool that can be
displayed graphically. Values between zero and one (0-unacceptable, 1-normal, between
0~1-degradation) represent the historical/current/predicted confidence value of the
component health. In practice, an alarm can be triggered when the confidence value
drops under a preset threshold indicative of unacceptable behavior. The risk radar chart
is a graphical tool used to prioritize maintenance decisions. It is a visualization tool for
plant-level maintenance information management that displays risk values, indicating
equipment maintenance priorities. The risk value of a machine (determined by the
product of the degradation rate and the value of the corresponding cost function)
indicates how important the machine is to the maintenance process. The higher the risk
value, the higher the priority given to that piece of equipment for maintenance.
The Watchdog Agent® toolbox contains a comprehensive set of computational tools
to convert data to information and predict machine or system degradation and
performance. With the availability of so many tools, however, the issue of how to choose
the most appropriate tools for a predetermined application arises. Traditionally, tool
selection for a specific application is purely heuristic, which is usually not applicable
when there is a lack of expert knowledge, and could be extraordinarily time-consuming
for complex problems. In order to automatically benchmark and be able to recommend
different tools for various applications, a quality function deployment (QFD) based
algorithm selection method is utilized for automatic algorithm selection, as depicted in
Table 1.
3.4 Implementation
IMS Device-to-Business (D2B)™ involves enabling devices to autonomously
connect to e-business systems in order to automatically trigger maintenance requests,
including the ordering of necessary spare parts, the deployment of maintenance
personnel, etc., when impending failures are detected. D2B integrates existing intelligent
maintenance principles with Web services and modern e-collaboration principles, which
will help to share and exchange not only information but also knowledge and intelligence
on whole factory floor level for business decision making. Intelligent maintenance
designed on a D2B platform will provide e-maintenance service for e-business, which
includes building a knowledge base and transforming useful information into valuable
asset for use by the maintenance management team, inventory management system, and
customer relationship initiative, etc.
IMS D2B platform addresses traditional connectivity problems between the
manufacturing level and the business level by connecting equipment or products with the
decision makers at the business level. Business decisions and service requests need to be
made based on available monitoring data but what data or information is available from
A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 11

the particular equipment or process, and how to get that data or information out, is not
always known. IMS D2B is essentially the knowledge base and equipment needed to
transform collected data, or simple information (such as error codes), into a valuable
assets for use by the maintenance management team, inventory management system,
customer relationship initiative, etc. And once this transformation ability is established,
additional modules can be added to the D2B Platform to meet the specific needs of the
industry, such as prognostics, alarming and notification, statistical analysis, or
optimization modules. Figure 7 shows the basic structure of the D2B platform.
As part of the D2B platform, the Watchdog Agent® will digest machine performance
data and generate more general but effective information to predict performance
degradation, and initiate service requests based on these predictions. Once machine
performance has fallen below a certain threshold, business transactions will be invoked
by the synchronization agent. Through the work flow management server connected to
the synchronization agent, information will be directed into different business systems,
such as the Customer Relations Management (CRM) system, Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) system and so on.
4. Applications
4.1 Product Service Design for Heavy Machinery Application
This particular application is for a heavy duty equipment vehicle used in mining and
construction, and the remote prognostics and monitoring system focused on assessing and
predicting the health of the diesel engine component. For this remote monitoring
application, the previously developed architecture for data acquisition and data storage
consisted of sending a daily data set of operating parameters from the diesel engine to a
remote location. The parameters include various pressures, fuel flow rate, temperature,
and rotational speed of the engine. These parameters are taken at key operating points for
the engine, such as at idle engine speed or at maximum exhaust gas temperature. The
previously developed architecture was missing the necessary algorithms to process the
data and assess the current health of the engine, determine the root cause of the
anomalous behavior, as well as predict the remaining life of the diesel engine. The
heavy duty equipment manufacturer in, collaboration with the Center for Intelligent
Maintenance Systems (IMS), developed a systematic approach utilizing several
algorithms from the Watchdog Agent® toolbox to convert the diesel engine data into
health information, that provides root cause analysis as well as remaining life prediction.
The data preprocessing step consisted of using the Huber method for outlier removal,
as well as the use of an auto-regressing moving average approach to predict a time series
value, a few steps ahead, to replace missing values. The missing values could be due to
an error in the transmission of the data to the remote location, or from the outlier removal
step. After preprocessing the data, the next step was to develop a methodology to
classify the different engine patterns in the data to particular engine related problems.
The use of a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) classification technique used the
manufacturer’s experience on engine related problems along with the pattern history of
the data in relation to known engine problems to build the model. This classification
model was able to interpret the anomalous engine behavior in the data and identify the
root cause of the problem at the early stage of degradation.
The last remaining step is the remaining life prediction, which employed a fuzzy
logic based algorithm. The fuzzy membership functions were based on engineering
experience as well as features extracted from the data patterns; this hybrid approach
accounts for the uncertainty in the data and combines data driven and expert knowledge
Jay Lee et al. 12

for a more robust approach. An overall visualization highlights a decision aid dashboard
that can be provided to the maintenance technician (see Figure 8).
4.2 System Service Design for Factory Energy Management
Due to the increasing levels of competition in industry today, the need for higher
market shares and the consistent demand for continuous quality improvement; many
companies are expanding beyond their core customer competencies to more service-
oriented product and business architecture. This unique transition differentiates such
companies from other competitors across the market. In order for this transition to be
successful, companies must strategically identify customers or markets that have not yet
been exploited, then evaluate and meet their latent needs. Such a transition from the
traditional manufacturing environment to an optimized customer-centric facility is critical
and unique. For any industrial facility, one way of achieving this transition is to expand
the current vision of optimized quality, cost, and delivery, to incorporate energy as a
fourth dimension.
Increasing energy costs, significant compliance and regulatory pressures, and the
necessity to effectively correlate maintenance activities with energy consumption; are
three major needs for industrial facilities today. An effective Precision Energy
Management System (PEMS) can adopt advanced technologies to remedy such issues
and fulfill the goal of enhancing energy performance for products, processes, and plants
(see Figure 9). Over the long-term, such a system is expected be an integral part of
energy and maintenance cost reduction, increased product and process quality, and an
enhanced market share adoption.
The vision for this project is related to three major components in an industrial
infrastructure:
• PRODUCT: the PEMS must be able to define, measure, analyze, and predict energy
consumption per product manufactured, in such a way that each product leaving the
process line can have an “Energy Label” that resembles the amount of energy
consumed in manufacturing this product.
• PROCESS: the PEMS must be able to use the developed energy metrics and
parameters for detailed operational analytics. In other words, the PEMS will assess
both equipment-level and process-level degradation and integrity. Such a correlation
between maintenance activities on the shop floor and energy consumed through the
machines and processes is an essential part of the PEMS initiative and is a large gap in
today’s industry operations.
• PLANT: the PEMS will enable a strategic IT-centric evolution to consider energy
analytics, thus inducing an Eco-IT framework for effective energy services
management, development, and implementation.
5. Conclusions
The benefits of an intelligent maintenance system will deliver new service functions
to different customers of different products. In a general enterprise, predictive
maintenance service of assets will enable a better information flow for better decision
making. For a manufacturing business, predictive maintenance service of equipment will
extend the life of equipment, increase uptime, increase product quality, decrease costs
and increase overall productivity. And for the product designer, predictive maintenance
service of the designed products will enable a collaborative product closed-loop life cycle
management.
A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 13

References
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process’ International Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing 14 (1) 59–82.
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Prognostics Approach for Product Performance Degradation Assessment and
Prediction’, Special Issue on Intelligent Maintenance Systems, Engineering
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3-4, , pp110-125.
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Manufacturing, Life-Cycle Modelling for Innovative Products and Processes’,
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Services,’ Harvard Business Review Article, Oct 1.
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and E-Maintenance,” Int. Journal of Computer in Industry, Volume 57, Issue 6.
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Jay Lee et al. 14

Figure 1: Core Informatics Agent for Unmet Maintenance Needs

Spare Parts Improve Design

Frequency

Predictive
Maintenance

IMPACT

Figure 2: 4-Quadrant Chart for Predictive Maintenance Service Function

A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 15

Figure 3: Procedure Flowchart for Maintenance Service Design

Jay Lee et al. 16

Figure 4: Data to Information Transformation and Visualization

Figure 5: Informatics Tools for Data to Information Transformation

Figure 6: Service Dashboard Visualization

A Systematic Approach for Predictive Maintenance Service Design 17

Table 1: Example of QFD-based Tool Selection

(a) (b)
Figure 7: Implementation through D2B™ at Different Levels of Abstraction
 Jay Lee et al. 18
Monitoring 
Remote Monitoring Center
Center Engineering

M odem Bank

Help desk

Parabolic antenna

Satellite

site 1

Modem Bank

Modem Bank Modem Bank

Modem Bank

Modem Bank

Modem Bank

M odem Bank

Modem Bank
Modem Bank

Figure 8: Product Service Design for Heavy Machinery

(Adapted from IMS member project)

F Machine‐level  Factory‐level  Remote Monitoring 

Service Energy  Auditing Energy‐based PLM Energy Services
Layer
Component‐Level Health Machine‐Level Health Process‐Level Health
C1 M1 P1
E
Information
Layer C2 CN M2 MN P2 PN

C3 M3 P3

D Physics‐based  Sensor‐based  Cost‐based

Model Energy Model Analytical Model
Analytical Model
Layer

Time‐Stamped 
C Data

Data 
Layer
V1 Temperature V2 Humidity V3 Current V3 Pressure V5 Electricity

B
Component 
Layer
C1 Motor C2 Compressor C3 Pump C4 Boiler … CN

P1
A
Process 
Layer
Raw Materials M1 M2 M3 M4 … MN Final Product

Figure 9: System Service Design for Factory Energy Management

(Adapted from IMS member project)

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