Soft computing methods applied to condition monitoring and fault diagnosis for maintenance

Malfunctions in equipment and components are often sources of reduced productivity and increased maintenance costs in various industrial applications. For this reason, machine condition monitoring is being pursued to recognize incipient faults in the strive towards optimising maintenance and productivity. In this respect, the following lecture notes provide the basic concepts underlying some methodologies of soft computing, namely neural networks, fuzzy logic systems and genetic algorithms, which offer great potential for application to condition monitoring and fault diagnosis for maintenance optimisation. The exposition is purposely kept on a somewhat intuitive basis: the interested reader can refer to the copious literature for further technical details.