Condition-based Maintenance with Functional Modeling: Challenges and Opportunities

Practices in the process industry have shown benefits from functional modeling in particular a methodology called Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) for corrective maintenance by quickly reasoning out the root-cause of failure and suggesting plausible counteractions to maintain the normal operation. In order to decrease the downtime and reduce the costs, condition-based maintenance (CBM) has also been advocated. With the robust capability of knowledge representation and automated reasoning for complex process systems, MFM has the potential for CBM by representing relevant functions and processing data from condition monitoring, but may need a revolutionary methodology extension from the process level to the perspective of mechanical equipment. This paper goes over the key CBM steps and prevailing CBM approaches, from which the possible opportunities and challenges of applying MFM as the unified knowledge base for CBM are defined. The authors aim to develop a computerized maintenance management system, which will interact with the existing MFM-based reasoning platforms to provide operators an integrative decision support for operation and maintenance.