A Conceptual Framework for Equipment Maintenance Automation under a Pyroprocessing Automation Framework

For most of the remote maintenance activities of equipment in a hot cell, replacing breakdown modules is preferred over in situ repair because of insufficient space in the cell and the limited operability of remote handling tools. In such cases, the maintenance operation can be decomposed into transport of the new modules to the failed equipment, replacement of the broken modules with new ones, and then transport of the broken parts to the reserved space for further repair or disposal. In this respect, transfer is the most basic operation during remote maintenance, which is also true for the maintenance of pyroprocessing equipment. Hence, this paper proposes a maintenance automation framework for automated pyroprocessing equipment from the standpoint of module transfer. For the maintenance automation framework, maintenance-related functions and events are defined, and they are integrated with the pyroprocess automation framework. The proposed framework is verified by a case study on the maintenance of a large module through a hardware-in-the-loop simulation.