Maintenance prevention information management system for facility life cycle management

Maintenance Prevention (MP) is an important concept for ensuring reliability and maintainability of manufacturing facilities by providing various information collected during actual operations (MP information) to their design phase. However, in many cases, information collected in the shop floor is not detailed and/or accurate enough to make use of it in the design phase. In this paper, we propose an MP information management system which can facilitate an information flow from operation phase to design phase. The system consists of two subsystems: a malfunction data input subsystem and an MP feedback information generation subsystem. In the former subsystem, malfunction data is represented in terms of a combination of deterioration and failure mechanisms, and properties of facility where the malfunction occurs. In the latter subsystem, malfunction cases which are similar with each other are extracted and generalized to induce MP feedback information by means of attribute-oriented induction algorithm.