Capture Events from Connected Equipment for Condition Monitoring

In this demo, we show how we can capture events from connected equipment and utilize them for condition monitoring. Before we start, let's look at the business value of this new feature. Asset availability is an important performance indicator for the maintenance function. Condition monitoring allows maintenance teams to quickly react to critical issues and minimize disruption to asset operations and production.

With this update, condition events from connected assets can be leveraged to automatically create maintenance work orders and/or production exceptions. Condition monitoring using captured events from connected equipment consists of three steps. First one is event ingestion. A connected asset detects a situation, for example, an overheating, for which it sends an event with a fault code.

The second one is an evaluation criteria. We use operational rules to define criteria, which are evaluated on incoming fault events. If evaluated successfully, the outcome will be executed. Outcome describes the action to be executed. It can either create a maintenance work order, or create a production exception, or both. Fault codes are interpreted as condition codes, which links them to maintenance programs and failure sets.

Now, let's see in action how we capture events using operational rules. The maintenance task list has a new entry called operational rules. We now start to create a new operational rule. In this example, we define an operational rule which detects overheating situations with a CNC machine. We give this operational rule a name, a description, a code, and can optionally select an inactive date.

In this operation rule, we want to capture two different events. The first one is the CNC control high temperature. We now start to create the first evaluation criteria. We want to capture fault events coming from the equipment. Therefore, we select the event type as asset fault.

The criteria gets a name, a description, and will be selected to be active. In this case, the equipment sends a fault code of 900, and the fault type Failure. We do the same for the second fault code that we want to capture, which is the CNC controller fan failure. In this case, the fault code is 901, and the fault type is again Failure. Then we define which criteria have to be satisfied before the outcome will be executed.

The first option is Any, which means at least one of the criteria has to be satisfied. The second option is All, which means all of the criteria have to be satisfied. Finally, we select the outcome. In our case, we want to create a maintenance work order, so we select this option. Now, we are done with all configuration, and we can click to create the new operational rule.

If you want to change that rule later, we can go into the list of rules and click Edit. In this case, I want to change the rule so that work orders will only be created if all of the events will be captured within a time frame of 15 minutes.

Now, let's see these rules in action. In this demonstration, we use a simulator to send events that are typically coming from equipment. Our asset has the code CNC002, so we use that in the events that we are sending. First, we start to send the event with a failure of 900. Then we send another event with fault code 901. So both events will be satisfied, but they have to be sent within 15 minutes in order to be captured by the rule.

Now that we have sent both events, let's see if the work order has been created. For the asset, CNC002 VC2 maintenance work orders, one of them being unreleased. This is our new work order. In the work order description, we see that our rule created this work order. In the description, we also see that fault codes 900 and 901 as sent by the simulator were captured. In Capture Failure, we also see both of our events being captured in a failure set.

This brings us to the end of the demo. We have seen how operational rules will be defined. We also saw how operational rules will be used on incoming events. And then finally, create work orders in maintenance.