Enabling smart maintenance services: Broker-based equipment status data acquisition and backend workflows

摘要

Global competition exhibits a strong pressure on organizations to optimize production processes and increase production flexibility. For example, to improve maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) processes of industrial equipment, an Internet-based data exchange system and backend workflow processing is required. Thereby an equipment vendor gathers field intelligence from equipment on customer premises worldwide. With the acquired data, smart services can be offered. Here, equipment maintenance tasks can be anticipated and thus on-premise equipment maintenance can be scheduled proactively. However, related work has focused mainly on two aspects. On the one hand, how to enable Internet-connectivity for legacy equipment has been investigated. One the other hand, the secure data acquisition systems have been presented. To address both aspects, Broker-based systems have been proposed. But related work does not address possible Broker architectures or the backend processing of data. Thus, in this work we investigate Broker- and backend-related aspects. First, we discuss topic structuring and access restriction. Second, we elaborate on different Broker placement architectures. Finally, we discuss and evaluate the design and implementation of an overall system and detail two concrete backend workflows.