Intelligent maintenance support system for Syncrude mining trucks

The large mining trucks at Syncrude are complicated integrated electro-mechanical systems. Their monitoring and maintenance involve a number of complex technical and economic issues. These ill-structured issues are becoming the bottleneck in implementing maintenance automation and reducing the maintenance cost which is an increasingly large portion of Syncrude´s operating costs, presently in the tens of millions. In the paper, attempts are made to apply artificial intelligence techniques to the field of equipment maintenance. We present an Intelligent Maintenance Support System (IMSS) for truck condition monitoring, fault diagnosis and maintenance, focusing on the development and implementation of its major components, database, knowledge base, compiler, inference engine and user interface