Assessment of functional condition of equipment in industrial plants based on multiple measurements

•Automatic machine condition assessment through multi-measurements joint evaluation.•New multi-measurement scales are applied to assess the machine functional condition.•The multi-measurement scale limits vary with the number of measurements available.•Machine status can be immediately implemented in the ERP system of the plant.•Machine status classification easily understandable for non-experts. Knowing the functional condition of production equipment at all times, that is, detecting and assessing any possible malfunction of it from the earliest stage of its appearance, is essential to avoid unforeseen interruptions in the production of any industrial plant. This work provides a methodology for the automatic assessment of the functional condition of the machines through joint evaluation of multiple measurements of one or several parameters, such as vibration or temperature, used in the Condition Based Maintenance for plant equipment. In this way, the information of the machinery status can be immediately implemented in the plant's computer system, making it accessible in real-time to all staff. Because of the dependencies that exist between the components of the machine, false alarms often occur when multiple measurements are analyzed separately. To avoid this, based on the limit values of the standard scale used to evaluate each parameter, this work proposes the use of variable limits, which vary according to the number of available measurements for every piece of equipment, in order to take into account the joint effect of all the measurements when evaluating its functional condition. The result is a novel method that calculates a new variable scale to evaluate each set of measurements carried out on a machine, allowing an immediate assessment of its functional condition, avoiding many false alarms and, therefore, helping to improve decision making.