IP sensor and its distributed networking application in e-maintenance

The advanced sensor networks play an increasingly important role to promote maintenance strategy shifting from traditional periodic maintenance to proactive e-maintenance in modern industry. IP sensor, a smart device that is Internet visible and capable, have been implemented in the paper, which has compliant STIM data structure described by IEEE 1451.2 standard, while an IP module is presented and adopted herein to instead NCAP to enable sensors entering into Internet in an easy and cost-effective way. It provides a powerful tool to gather information at plant level of the distributed application to enable remote maintenance engineering transparently monitoring and operating the field devices over Internet in e-maintenance system. Finally, a full working prototype of the system is realized, and two experiments have been conducted to experimentally verify the IP sensor proposed herein are feasible and suitable for distributed applications under LAN environment.