Supporting maintenance personnel through a multi-agent system

Reducing costs in the production process is paramount to the existence of especially-small and medium-sized enterprises in today's market. One approach is to make the machines themselves more reliable, thereby reducing their down-times. The other angle to be considered are human resources. The modem term of "empowerment of people" applies also to the machine operators. The more the personnel at the machine is capable of repairing or preventing damage, the lower the costs for this repair and the shorter the down-time. This means, operators have to be supported in the fault-finding process by a knowledge-based decision-support system. Diagnostic tools bear the danger of people relying too much on them and their capabilities, so that after a while the formerly competent personnel looses their competence. The questions how to prevent this from happening and how to even increase competence on the job will be answered in the following by presenting a multi-agent architecture and an instrument to measure competence enhancement. Copyright (C) 2001 IFAC.