Increasing the availability of FMS with multimedia-supported diagnostic expert systems

This paper summarizes some of the results in the field of diagnostic expert systems of the EUREKA MAINE EU 744 project ‘FMSMAINT System’. Methods and software have been developed to increase the lower-than-expected availability of expensive flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). In the work described in this paper a special emphasis has been put on efficiently integrating automatic data acquisition, data analysis supported by multimedia, and expert-system-based diagnostics. The software described has been installed in the industrial pilots participating in the project, and the modules have already also been taken to a commercial level.