Life extension of critical manufacturing systems

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The context is manufacturing industries, and ageing, but critical, legacy production assets that are unreliable, require frequent maintenance, are unsafe, and struggle to achieve the performance required by world class supply chains. The conventional approach is to scrap and replace the plant and equipment; but, this is expensive, disruptive, with a negative environmental impact.We intent to use our considerable skill and knowledge in production systems to extend the useful life of these systems. Reliability improved, maintenance reduced, operating safely, incorporating IIoT technologies, with operational, technical and economic performance such that a system is no longer a liability rather a valuable asset with many further years of useful life.The first task in the design and installation of a data acquisition system to comprehensively monitor the state and performance of an asset, process and product. The data is submitted for analysis, statistical and machine learning, to reveal the behaviour and performance of the system, and with this knowledge, and user input, build a digital twin, and then develop a refurbishment or re-engineering scheme, and a predictive and prescriptive maintenance regime.This innovation project will develop a robust, technically sound and cost effective ideal data acquisition and analytics system, which can be readily configured to satisfy the peculiar requirements of a wide range of production systems, in different companies, across various sectors. It will be based on an open-source technology to offer an alternative approach to digitalisation, thus avoiding subscription costs, eliminates vendor lock-in and technology sunsetting, and grants freedom in terms of communication protocols and data formats.