The maintenance of the RWE power plant in Pembroke, UK, is a complex task and requires a large number of components that have to work together in perfect harmony. Maintenance and servicing work must be flawlessly scheduled and performed to ensure that the lights do not go out in private households or businesses.
However, the facts relevant for risk assessment are scattered throughout the company in different knowledge silos. These silos often result in a large amount of manual effort being needed to organise power plant maintenance. To be able to access the data from the previous knowledge silos in a central location, RWE and adesso are building a uniform data platform based on Microsoft Azure Cloud. This allows prediction models for power plant components to be developed. The results of these models support human intelligence in making value-based maintenance decisions, such as when which power plant component should undergo maintenance.
As part of this, adesso is developing dashboards based on Power BI that visualise all the information on and forecasts for the influencing factors. This information allows maintenance engineers in the power plants to carry out individual risk assessments and plan maintenance operations. Value-based maintenance (VBM) plays a key role in this context. It supports supervisors in deciding when what maintenance needs to be carried out on the power plant. VBM uses factors such as the condition of the power plant components, the operating status of the power plant, the economic impact of maintenance measures or a component failure to do this.
