Industrial requirements for the development of a prognostics platform

In today's global competitive marketplace, there is an intense pressure for manufacturing industries to continuously reduce and eliminate costly, unscheduled downtime and unexpected breakdowns. Moreover, fast growth of communication technologies, computer and information technologies have changed the pattern of maintenance. New maintenance approaches, namely prognostics and e-maintenance, have emerged and are gradually replacing the traditional maintenance solutions. The paper shows the industrial requirements for the design of an e-maintenance and prognostics platform. The research is carried out within the Intellimech Consortium, a newly Italian initiative in the applied research field, which includes 25 industrial companies and aims at contributing and spreading out knowledge and managerial culture on maintenance engineering.