Determination of Optimum Criteria for Condition-based Maintenance of Automatic Ticket Gates Using Remote Monitoring Data

Condition-based maintenance is effective in improving availability by preventing failure occurrences, especially in the case where the lives of equipment or components are unstable because of varying operating and environmental conditions. However, failure symptoms are not necessarily detected by monitoring systems in an accurate manner. In such cases, we need to determine the proper criteria for the effective execution of preventive maintenance to minimize the total effects, which include both the effects of successful preventive maintenance and those of unsuccessful ones. This paper proposes a method to determine the optimum criteria for executing the preventive maintenance of the mechatronics equipment. The error messages generated from the sensor signals do not have one-to-one correspondence with the component deterioration and failures because the mechatronics equipment usually use sensors, which are equipped for control purposes, to monitoring the failure symptoms. Therefore, we need to devise the method to relate the error messages with the deterioration and failures. We propose a four-step procedure for this purpose, in which a structural and functional analysis is integrated with a history data analysis. The proposed methods are applied to the automatic ticket gates installed in the train stations in Japan to verify their effectiveness.