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Condition monitoring and maintenance of devices and equipment is an important aspect of operating a production facility affecting the availability of production systems. Modern production environments can consist of thousands of devices that each need to be monitored so that maintenance can be performed when necessary to sustain a cost-effective state of production. Today operation and maintenance (O&M) is typically outsourced, and equipment and device manufacturers have also entered the service business. This brings challenges in managing a multitude of different devices using different protocols as well as in the varying needs for utilizing this information in enterprise functions and services. Based on OPC Unified Architecture (UA) a scalable architecture is developed for providing device status information of heterogeneous field devices and sensors to enterprise level applications and services. A proof of concept implementation of this architecture is presented and its envisioned adoption in a mine environment is discussed.
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Hästbacka et al. (2014) studied this question.