Every plant operator or maintenance technician knows them: the 'problem children' - plant components or machines for which you prefer to do an extra monitoring round just to make sure that everything is really in the green. These are mostly mechanical components with a low level of automation. They are not classified as highly critical and are therefore not monitored extensively. And yet a failure would lead to greater expense and possibly to a longer plant downtime

With an all-around easy-to-use system and by using artificial intelligence, Siemens AG wants to turn such problem children into the new asset darlings of a plant. We found out exactly how this works in an interview with Johannes Burchardt, Lukas Marschalek, and Michael Hartl