Integrating Case-Based Reasoning and Hypermedia Documentation: An Application for the Diagnosis of a Welding Robot at Odense Steel Shipyard

Reliable and effective maintenance support is a vital consideration for the management within today’s manufacturing environment. This paper discusses the development a maintenance system for the world largest robot welding facility. The developed system combines a case-based reasoning approach for diagnosis with context information, as electronic on-line manuals, linked using open hypermedia technology. The work discussed in this paper delivers not only a maintenance system for the robot stations under consideration, but also a design framework for developing maintenance systems for other similar applications.