Global Condition Monitoring System - Implementing MATLAB-Based Analysis Services

Proactive maintenance is a solution to increase the availability of the production equipment in the process industry. It involves online condition monitoring of field devices and reliably diagnosing the reason behind any abnormal behaviour, thus helping to rationalise maintenance operations. Making the information of different industrial sites available for analysis, significant improvements could be made to the predicting capabilities of condition monitoring and to the accuracy of fault diagnostics. The global condition monitoring system described in this paper is based on distributed agent-architecture and employs data communication networks to connect the industrial sites to one or more service centres. Many successful methods used in condition monitoring and fault diagnostics often require advanced tools. MATLAB® software is the de facto standard in numerical computing but integrating MATLAB® as a computing server to the J2EE-based condition monitoring system is a laborious task as no all-purpose and easy-to-use methods exist. However, this paper introduces some strategies to overcome the integration problem. The most important solution presented here is so called inverted calling scheme. Also two other approaches are discussed: using MATLAB® engine functions via C-language native methods and deployment of standalone MATLAB® COM components. All the above strategies have their strengths and weaknesses. Implementing the inverted call requires more effort from the programmer but is standard-compliant. Exploiting engine functions or COM components is easier as some ready-made software can be employed but the emerging solutions are not pure-Java.