Toward cyber-physical networks and smartly active sensing IETM for equipment maintenance in marine ships

The equipment maintenance for marine ships is of upmost importance especially in a long-distance voyage. This problem becomes more challengeable as the numbers and sorts of equipments become much larger in very large ships. Traditional on-board equipment maintenance heavily relies on a technology called IETM (Interactive Electronic Technical Manual). However, traditional IETM technology has several limitations: 1) It cannot automatically and actively collect diagnose information; 2) The manual input or operation for IETM is frequent and time-consuming; 3) IETM is standalone or heavily rely on central servers. Therefore, the response for removal of faults imposes a large delay and low accuracy. In this paper, we make the first attempt to incorporate Cyber-Physical Networks and active IETM together to tackle aforementioned limitations. IETM can sense equipment status and environmental parameters in real time. IETM can also respond diagnosing guidance smartly. Cyber-Physical network is a network of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that physical object may be embedded sensing and acting functions. The function models, architectures, and reasoning models are proposed. The diagnosing algorithm is also presented for clarity and off-the-shelf implementation. The discussion in the paper makes the first attempt to incorporate CPS into IETM for equipment maintenance, which stimulate further novel and promising discussions in the future.