Watchdog – Information Technology for Proactive Product Maintenance and Its Implications to Ecological Product Re-Use

In today’s competitive market, production costs, lead time and optimal machine utilization are crucial values for companies. Since machine or process breakdowns severely limit their effectiveness, methods are needed to predict products’ life expectancy. Furthermore, information about the remaining life of products and their components is crucial for their disassembly and reuse, which in turn leads to a more efficient and environmentally friendly usage of products and resources. Development of the Watchdog Agent answers the needs for enabling predictive condition-based maintenance of the product and/or its disassembly and reuse in another system through enabling multi-sensor performance assessment and prediction.