Mini-Term 4.0. A Real-Time Maintenance Support System To Prognosticate Breakdowns In Production Lines

This paper presents a Real-time Maintenance Support System (MSS) to prognosticate breakdowns in production lines. The system is based on the sub-cycle time monitoring, mini-terms, and how the sub-cycle time variability can be used as a deterioration indicator that could describe the dynamic of the failure for the machine parts. A Real-time MSS has been installed at Ford factory located in Almussafes (Valencia), the so-called Mini-term 4.0. At present, three plants, Body 1,2 and 3 have hundreds of mini-terms sensed by the system. The connected production line elements are the welding guns, elevators, screwdriver and scissor tables. Mini-term 4.0 uses the well-known k-means algorithm to detect change points. The K-means constructs two groups and, when centroid values differ more than 7 % (orange alert), or 18 % (red alert), an e-mail is sent to maintenance team to schedule the maintenance task. Some examples of the different change point topologies detected are shown at the end of the paper.