Supervision and Safety of Complex Systems

Chapter 7Multitask Learning for the Diagnosis of Machine Fleet ¹

 

 

 

7.1. Introduction

Nowadays, in manufacturing or production systems, condition-based maintenance is preferred over preventive maintenance because it is technically achievable and financially advantageous [CAM 09]. It is based on the surveillance of the state of the system considered from information collected on it, i.e. on the ability to detect and diagnose its dysfunctions in order to be able to plan maintenance actions for the “equipment” involved. Since the beginning of 2000, with the rise of information and communication technologies (Web, mobile, etc.), new forms of maintenance such as remote condition-based maintenance (e-CBM) have emerged [MUL 08, HIG 04].

This evolution is translated at the industrial level into the development of new solutions and new services, in particular the possibility to monitor a fleet of equipment (fleet-wide monitoring). The main idea is, through an overall vision of the operation of the set of machines, to improve the efficiency of the monitoring of the machines of this fleet. We find examples of these applications in the domain of transport: a fleet of cars [YOU 05], or planes or boats; in the energy sector (see, for instance, the websites of the companies Smartsignal¹ or EPRI²): a fleet of thermal, hydraulic, or nuclear power plants [KUN 03], of wind turbines, etc. Many of these solutions mainly offer a hardware and software architecture enabling communication between the ...