IBM Announces the Equipment Maintenance Assistant System

More details on how the Equipment Maintenance Assistance tool works.

The world of asset management platforms is getting bigger by the day, with machine-modeling Silicon Valley companies entering the fray and, of course, industry stalwarts like IBM (Armonk, NY) staying the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) course. Not to be outdone, IBM announced earlier this week a new prescriptive maintenance system called the Equipment Maintenance Assistant, which uses Watson Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and targets field service and factory technicians.

The new platform addresses the need for recording and managing maintenance data, either structured or unstructured data in most handheld devices. Data examples can be work orders, maintenance notes, technical documents, manuals or regulatory standards. With the Watson AI technology and older data, “the platform provides diagnosis and prescriptive guidance on the most effective repair,” according to IBM.

This is how the tool works according to IBM.

Sensors provide equipment information and data is processed via the Watson IoT platform or EAM systems. From there, condition-based monitoring rules or predictive analytics are run to evaluate equipment status and provide early warning of issues.  Visualizations are immediately updated and diagnostics are performed by searching unstructured text, historical maintenance data and contextual information to indentify potential repair recommendations. Repair is identified and implemented, the system collects responsive effectiveness to improve future diagnosis.

>> For the two-page technology brief, visit here.