Industrial distributed system for an integrated maintenance application

Power transformers' failures bring great costs to electric companies since they need resources to recover from them and to perform periodical maintenance. To avoid this problem in four working 40 MVA transformers, the authors have implemented the measurement system of a failure prediction tool, that is the basis of a predictive maintenance infrastructure. Applying data warehouse techniques, the prediction models have been provided with an abstraction of sensors the authors have called virtual acquisition cards (VAC). By means of these virtual devices, models have access to clean data, both fresh and historic, from the set of sensors they need. Besides, a replication scheme was implemented to allow the distribution of demanding processing tasks and the remote management of the prediction applications.