HomePublicationsBEng Thesis

Home-Appliances Monitoring
Ref: CISTER-TR-181006       Publication Date: 25, Oct, 2018

Abstract:
Maintenance is a concept that has affected humanity ever since their innovations appeared. From musical instruments, to machinery, and even their own bodies, maintenance is the concept of extending an object’s health span by taking special care of it. This report focuses on the maintenance of home appliances. The home of the 21st century is a hub of electrical technology. With the rise of the machine, so too came the demand for maintenance, as maintenance is what keeps machinery in operation. Maintenance is normally costly and sometimes stressful as it mostly depends on two factors: the technicians, who can repair the machines and solve malfunctions; and luck, since the severity of the malfunction depends on its type. However, the norm for household appliances dictates that these technicians only enter the maintenance scene after a malfunction has happened. This is counterproductive, as it already causes downtime. And so, the concept of predictive maintenance emerged. Predictive maintenance, as the name implies, exists to predict malfunctions before they happen. This report describes a system that implements the concept of Smart Predictive Maintenance (Smart-PDM). It utilizes the appliance’s own consumption to analyse its life-cycle and determine if a malfunction looms over it, using a sensor connected between the outlet and the appliance, and an entire set of tools including middleware, data analysis and graph generation, it generates alerts that warn the appliance’s user to the faults at hand.

Miguel Costa