Assistance system for a bulk good system based on information fusion

Industrial companies are constantly looking for methods to maintain a certain process efficiency and steady performance of their machines. Assistance systems support users in different applications such as driving, industrial expert systems, and physician assistance to achieve these objectives. This paper proposes an assistance system, which can support an operator by means of using the accumulated knowledge of process experts, and thus providing recommendations for improving the process performance. An architecture based on information fusion and rule-based programming is presented. The information fusion considers the Dempster-Shafer rule of combination, in order to fuse the process knowledge of different experts into a consolidated expertise. A rule-based approach serves as a way to combine the process knowledge with the machine data. The technical implementation considers an industrial communication protocol OPC-UA, which enables a data interface between the assistance system and the automation platform. This paper presents an application case to illustrate how the assistance system interacts with the process experts, as well as the assessment to the operator.