Predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance techniques are designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. This approach promises cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted. Thus, it is regarded as condition-based maintenance carried out as suggested by estimations of the degradation state of an item. The main promise of predictive maintenance is to allow convenient scheduling of corrective maintenance, and to prevent unexpected equipment failures. The key is "the right infor equipment lifetime, increased plant safety, fewer accidents with negative impact on environment, and optimized spare parts handling. Predictive maintenance differs from preventive maintenance because it relies on the actual condition of equipment, rather than average or expected life statistics, to predict when maintenance will be required. Typically, Machine Learning approaches are adopted for the definition of the actual condition of the system and for forecasting its future states. Some of the main components that are necessary for implementing predictive maintenance are data collection and preprocessing, early fault detection, fault detection, time to failure prediction, maintenance scheduling and resource optimization. Predictive maintenance has also been considered to be one of the driving forces for improving productivity and one of the ways to achieve "just-in-time" in manufacturing. Predictive maintenance evaluates the condition of equipment by performing periodic (offline) or continuous (online) equipment condition monitoring. The ultimate goal of the approach is to perform maintenance at a scheduled point in time when the maintenance activity is most cost-effective and before the equipment loses performance within a threshold. This results in a reduction in unplanned downtime costs because of failure, where costs can be in the hundreds of thousands per day depending on industry.