Intelligent maintenance support system for mining trucks

Maintenance of heavy mining trucks at Syncrude Canada Ltd. amounts to several million dollars per year. The trucks are large with complex componentry and it is difficult for any one person to become an expert in all the maintenance procedures. Built into the trucks is a hardware monitoring system that monitors and records the performance of the vehicles. To facilitate better maintenance and reduce downtime, a project was initiated with the University of Alberta to develop an Intelligent Maintenance Support System (IMSS).;The system has three functions. The first function is condition monitoring. The condition monitoring is divided into normal condition monitoring, which displays a graphical trend of vehicle component performance, and abnormal condition monitoring, which detects faults that occur within the truck. The second function is component fault diagnosis, which narrows the conclusion of the abnormal condition monitoring to a specific component. The third function is maintenance assistance, which provides maintenance information to the user. It is an integrated system whereby the three modules work in conjunction with one another, each module using the results of the previous one. The abnormal condition monitoring and component fault diagnosis make use of expert systems, while the maintenance assistance employs a hypermedia package.;This thesis is a discussion of the development and the methodology of integration of the IMSS modules. Also discussed is the development of the supporting subsystems in the IMSS.