An integrated system for supporting remote maintenance services

In today's marketplace machine producers are shipping their systems all around the world. Maintenance costs are becoming ever greater due to travel costs for sending service personnel to wherever the machines are installed to solve a particular problem. In the majority of cases, a technician solves the problem quickly, so that the travel overhead becomes a large part of the repair cost. This makes remote diagnosis, debugging and repair an obvious advantage. This paper describes a remote maintenance methodology that uses wireless and mobile technology to record and transmit video and machine operational parameters together for remote viewing and analysis. This information is sent to the machine manufacturer's headquarters, where a thorough analysis of it is done by experts there, and a solution is then transmitted to the remote site to correct the problem. The structure of this remote diagnostic system is described, and details about its implementation on a real machine used in manufacturing are given.