The need of condition monitoring to support simulations when predicting system availability of Functional Products

Abstract: Today, competition among product manufacturers has increased and many face being copied and thus losing their uniqueness. To differentiate on the market, new businesses, which extend the manufacturer’s responsibility through supporting and guaranteeing product performance, thus offering more valuecreating activities, have received increasing interest. The concepts of Functional Products or Total Offers have emerged through the realization that it is tougher to compete with hardware products only. The Functional Products concept combines the development of hardware, software, services and management of operation, thereby integrating value-adding activities into complete offers. Offering a Functional Product is usually a lifecycle commitment (long-term business-to-business agreement) between the function provider and customer. In this type of business, agreed-upon availability is of importance, especially since the availability of a function can directly influence customers’ productivity. The provider and customer need to predict and evaluate the availability of the function, both in early phases of the product development process and continuously during operation throughout the contracted time. In this thesis, in paper A, a model for predicting and monitoring industrial system availability has been proposed to enable the provider of Functional Products to continuously evaluate, through simulation, the offer in terms of availability performance. The model integrates hardware, support system and monitoring system components and through this approach it is possible to utilize operational data in simulations for continuous prediction of availability during operation. Further, the results of paper B presented in this thesis may extend and improve the model proposed in paper A, if implemented. The results of paper B describe the addition of data stream forecasting to the data stream management fault detection system and have showed improved prediction capabilities. The approach to evaluate the availability in paper A may also be extended and improved through the results presented and demonstrated in paper C. In paper C, a software tool to predict system availability has been developed and demonstrated with data from a real industrial system. The results from the simulation demonstrated, together with the addition of the partitioned multiobjective risk method in paper C, provided an indication of what level of availability may be guaranteed for the product; thus, the approach may be used to compare the availability performance of different designs.