Abstract
The advantages of plant utilisation in off-highway activities such as construction, mining, forestry, etc can never be over-emphasised. As a result of the enormous demand placed on this valuable resource, documentation has become paramount in their effective utilisation. Such documentation relate to inventories, maintenance records, costs, utilisation and breakdown records, etc. Several efforts have been made in order to institute an efficient plant history information regime. These ranged from traditional paper- based to the ("relatively newer") IT-based methods. However, a literature review and pilot study reveal that these are yet to cope with the dynamism with which historical data are generated. Also, when compared with other similar "advanced industries" such as aviation shipping, railways and roads; off-highway plant lags behind in the application of webbased `intelligent' information systems. This research sought to improve off-highway plant information management through the development and application of INTELLIPLANT, a web-based information system. The system evolved as an integration of a web-based Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) and a Model Base Management System (MBMS). The RDBMS was designed from the forms collected during a pilot/ field investigation, while the MBMS emerged from the assemblage of time series models developed from a rigorous analytical procedure. INTELLIPLANT has the capacity to generate over 20 real-time history reports on-line through its RDBMS structure. In addition, the MBMS models predict plant breakdown time (BDPERC) as a percentage of plant availability time for wheel loaders, backhoe-loaders, hydraulic excavators and off-highway haulers. The models depend on the lagged BDPERC, percentage utilisation (UTILPERC), standby percentage (SBPERC) and fault occurrence percentage (FLTPERC). Model validation results indicated acceptable MAD and RMSE performance statistics for each model. Also, results from the practitioner-led performance evaluation of the system indicated that the development of INTELLIPLANT is a significant contribution to off-highway plant history information management.Publisher
University of WolverhamptonType
Thesis or dissertationLanguage
enDescription
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyCollections
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