Information fusion in maintenance planning

Industrial production service organisations, companies maintainingproduction machines and whole processes as well as factories, are in great demand ofproductivity and profitavility improvement. Usually performance in theseorganisations arises from high utilization of personnel, superior engineeringknowledge and purchasing expertise/power. However, small and medium sizedmaintenance service providers mostly differate themselves with two first mentioneditems. In this paper we will propose information fusion cockpit to be used in theSME maintenance organisation to enhance problem solving, demand visibility andresource need estimates – hopefully this will enhance the performance of a caseorganisation. As a key input variable to manage large amount of different customerswe identify incoming calls to trigger information collection from vast number ofdifferent databases – the integration of this incoming “demand” is the first step to betaken in the use of more advanced systems. We also speculate in this paper, howagent based artificial intelligence could be used in order to take full benefit frommore advanced system