Predictive maintenance and diagnostics of machine tools

The objective of condition-based predictive maintenance applied to machine tools is the "measurement" of the slow degradation taking place in mechanical components in advance of the consequent failures and the evaluation of the residual life in order to better manage the total Life Cycle Cost. An automatic self-tuning of the system should accompany this procedure, in order to always optimize the machine tool performance as an optimal trade-off between surface quality and machining speed. These activities may be performed by intelligent software modules, communicating among them, with the machines, the sensors and the humans. The implementation of some of these modules is taking place in the frame of the project "Intelligent Networked Manufacturing System" (INT-MANUS).