New Maintenance Opportunities in Legacy Plants

Applying condition based maintenance may be the only way to keep the performance of many legacy plants high enough. Commercial applications for condition based maintenance might often be too rigid to be applied to older machines. Sometimes they can be extremely specialized for some families of products or in very specific fields of application. In addition we can have several external providers of maintenance services and this can lead to a sort of confusion in maintenance actions. In this paper we suggest an approach to achieve a condition based maintenance in old plants, without peculiar exceptions for the technology involved, maintained through a collaborative network of enterprises. A little plant prototype was built as a test case for the functioning of the expert system to manage the condition based maintenance and the network of skills involved.