Smart Life Cycle Monitoring for Sustainable Maintenance and Production - an example for Selective Laser Melting machine

Smart linking, evaluation and provision of information over the life cycle of a product are becoming growingly important. The use of information extracted from combination of monitoring data, product data, maintenance information, and from product utilisation data can increase the availability of production machines and reduce the costs and resources cause by machine downtime. Especially for new manufacturing technologies such as Selective Laser Melting, the storage and management of such information are crucially important to develop knowledge and improve the quality of the machines and their products. By acquiring data from the machine, processing them and calculating proper key performance indicators, the critical region where the failures are most commonly found and the critical subsystems responsible for the failures are identified. Moreover, using the historical data, the tolerances for those subsystems can be defined. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.