Servitisation of fault diagnosis for mechanical equipment in cloud manufacturing

Faults in mechanical equipment could cause breakdown of time-critical production systems, which is very expensive in terms of production losses and re-commissioning costs. In cloud manufacturing, the scattered distribution of mechanical equipment and fault diagnosis resources, such as experts and specialist instruments, etc., could hinder the development of fault diagnosis systems. The idea of resource servitisation, aimed at resource sharing and collaboration, will lead fault diagnosis systems toward integration, low cost and high efficiency. This paper focuses on the servitisation of fault diagnosis for mechanical equipment in cloud manufacturing. A new service-oriented fault diagnosis system framework for mechanical equipment is proposed, together with a new servitisation method of fault diagnosis for mechanical equipment. Moreover, enabling technologies, e.g. XML, Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), Axis2, are also analysed. Finally, a prototype system is presented that demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed architecture and servitisation method in a cloud manufacturing environment.