Anyone using a Remote Monitoring Center to track your machine/fleet condition? MY understanding is that GE is heavily into this, that many of the large Power companies have set up internal remote monitoring centers, and that all the airlines has some sort of remote condition monitoring.

I would be interested in hearing about user experience with these services, what was done well, what could be done better.

I visited the remote monitoring center at Nuovo Pignone in Florence, and I must say I came away pretty impressed.

I have only seen a very limited use here, a iron ore refining plant where the tough environment give problems to keep transducers and cables alive is obvious, a refurb facility for DC10 engines among others where you get tracking vibration from the shafts of the engines at random load so you can recognize that a engine need balancing at a specific shaft compared to the others but that is now a pretty old design so I think modern engines give more data. I also seen some purpose designed systems for generators and other specific machines. I think a central group work fine if you have a lot of machines of the same basic design that all from time to time get the same type of problems, aeroengines, turbogen´s should be perfect.
Nukes from the same basic brand should possibly work but already there they are individual even on the same site. In Finland they wired all turbogens vibration data of one of the utilities to a central by LAN like 10 years ago. They also added a rule based "expert" system on top of that.
If you would wire the complete set of papermills owned by one of the major papercompanys it would give the central group some headache since they would be a wild collection of machinery. Only my opinion. Olov

My company has provided remote monitoring services for the past 30 years. Obviously our methodology has evolved with computer and communications technology and now includes online monitoring. If anyone is interested I would be happy to explain some of the fundamental approaches to making this type of monitoring successful (alot of it has to do with methodology and program management rather than just technology although the right technology will facilitate the methodology). I should also mention that what I mean by monitoring is providing a client with specific mechanical fault diagnosis with a severity and a repair recommendation - also with a severity or "priority".
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