MAID (Machinery AID): a software tool for supervision and fault diagnosis of packaging machineries

The objectives of MAID were to design a system able to support human operators, in charge of daily supervision and maintenance of packaging machines in a manufacturing plant, during the procedures for the identification and recovery of machine failures. The diagnostic systems to be developed was supposed to be user-friendly, with an easy to use graphical interface, in order to allow even unskilled technicians to efficiently solve the problems causing machine failures and to promptly restart the manufacturing production. The diagnostic system was supposed to be able to communicate in real-time with machine control systems, in order to automatically visualize on the user interface the alarm code generating a machine stop and, according to this alarm code, show to the human operator a fault identification procedure and the suggested operations for machine recovery