Application Potentials for an Ontology-based Integration of Intelligent Maintenance Systems and Spare Parts Supply Chain Planning

Abstract

In today's evermore complex manufacturing systems, effective and efficient maintenance has become crucial for achieving operational competitive advantages. Breakdowns and system failures caused by insufficient maintenance can lead to significant economic impact such as higher costs, diminishing profits and declined customer satisfaction. In order to avoid unforeseen systems’ unavailability, it is necessary to accurately and precisely forecast maintenance demand in advance – including the provision of maintenance services and spare parts. Moreover, the management and planning of spare parts supply chains has become more important in order to ensure the availability of spare parts and maintenance personnel at the required location and time while operating at reasonable costs. Both issues are recently targeted by the research domains of intelligent maintenance systems (IMS) – forecasting machine failures using a condition-based maintenance (CBM) approach – and spare parts supply chains (SPSC) – planning and providing related maintenance services and spare parts. A proper integration of these two domains enables the exchange of relevant information that could be applied for advanced failure forecasting, machine control and SPSC planning. However, the challenge of integrating both domains is to deal with the different meanings and knowledge, e.g., the concepts being applied in both domains vary in their level of granularity and importance. This paper addresses the integration problem of IMS devices and SPSC planning systems by presenting a refined ontology including concepts that semantically connect the different systems and thus provides the basis for a conceptual integration architecture and a deduced service-oriented architecture facilitating dynamic communication services to support the information exchange. Furthermore, the applied design of the ontology is described for an industrial case and the application potentials to be achieved by the integration of both system types are highlighted.