The Bremen Institute for Production and Logistics(BIBA) is working on UPTIME with eleven partners from six EU countries, including the end-users Whirlpool from Italy (household appliances), M.J. Maillis who are based in Greece (steel industry) and FFT in Germany (production and testing systems). UPTIME stands for ‘Unified Predictive Maintenance System’. Over the next three years, project participants want to research methods and tools for predictive maintenance. The specific goal is to create a toolkit that uses status data to supply recommended actions directly from the machine. As part of this process, devices such as oscillation recognition instruments will be used, which measure vibrations using their sensors and then forward the values to the toolkit, which uses intelligent components to draw conclusions about the wear-and-tear of the machine parts.

UPTIME has a running time of three years and a total cost of around 6 million Euros. As part of the Horizon 2020 program, the EU has provided sponsorship of 4.8 million Euros, a good million of which goes to BIBA. Management handed this over to the project, where work has already gotten underway. CEO Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus-Dieter Thoben explained that he felt a 10% increase in production efficiency could be possible with the new tools.