Defining and implementing a distributed and reconfigurable information system for prognostics

According to Condition Based Maintenance practitioners, various activities, ranging from data collection through the recommendation of specific maintenance actions, must be carried out to perform predictive maintenance. Nevertheless, in practice, (and in spite of recommendations like those ones of the OSA-CBM standard), defining and implementing a computer software system for CBM is not a trivial task. That can be mostly explained by the necessity of providing a distributed application that enables to share data and information in an easy but effective manner in-between various actors from various industrial plants. Following that, the aim of the paper is to describe a collaborative software that has been developed in the society e-m@systec. Its simple architecture, as well as its evolving and customizable capabilities make the global information system as useful for distributed applications. The usage of JEE technology improves the portability of the system. This software is well adapted to support predictive maintenance strategies. Thereby and as for an illustration, an example related to a prognostic problem is also described.