Maintenance management of tractors and agricultural machinery: Preventive maintenance systems

Agricultural machinery maintenance has a crucial role for successful agricultural production. It aims at guaranteeing the safety of operations and availability of machines and related equipment for cultivation operation. Moreover, it is one major cost for agriculture operations. Thus, the increased competition in agricultural production demands maintenance improvement, aiming at the reduction of maintenance expenditures while keeping the safety of operations. This issue is addressed by the methodology presented in this paper. So, the aim of this paper was to give brief introduction to various preventive maintenance systems specially condition-based maintenance (CBM) techniques, selection of condition monitoring techniques and understanding of condition monitoring (CM) intervals, advancement in CBM, standardization of CBM system, CBM approach on agricultural machinery, advantages and disadvantages of CBM. The first step of the methodology consists of concept condition monitoring approach for the equipment preventive maintenance; its purpose is the identification of state-of-the-art in the CM of agricultural machinery, describing the different maintenance strategies, CM techniques and methods. The second step builds the signal processing procedure for extracting information relevant to targeted failure modes. Keywords: agricultural machinery, fault detection, fault diagnosis, signal processing, maintenance managemen