A Real-Time Architecture for Proactive Decision Making in Manufacturing Enterprises

We outline a new architecture for supporting proactive decision making in manufacturing enterprises. We argue that event monitoring and data processing technologies can be coupled with decision methods effectively providing capabilities for proactive decision-making. We present the main conceptual blocks of the architecture and their role in the realization of the proactive enterprise. We illustrate how the proposed architecture supports decision-making ahead of time on the basis of real-time observations and anticipation of future undesired events by presenting a practical condition-based maintenance scenario in the oil and gas industry. The presented approach provides the technological foundation and can be taken as a blueprint for the further development of a reference architecture for proactive applications.