A Factory Health Monitor: System identification, process monitoring, and control

An important quality of manufacturing process implementation is ensuring that all controllers operate exactly as they are intended when applied to a system. Unfortunately, because the many subsystems in a factory are often developed independently, this is not always the case and logical errors and incorrect software-hardware interactions can exist and develop which can cause non-optimal or incorrect operation and lower plant efficiency. The factory health monitor (FHM) is a factory floor information analysis system that was created to improve industrial processes by reducing the time required to identify errors in operation. This research associated with FHM development addresses the issues and implementation of a non-intrusive monitoring scheme, a method of system identification appropriate to a manufacturing process, and suggests methods and future research in error avoidance. The system identification method is described in detail with a focus on the communication of relevant information to the operator and system. The FHM was applied to test setups and an industrial testbed, where accurate system models were created. The benefits of using the FHM are illustrated through the identification and avoidance of a particular hardware based error present in the industrial testbed.