This action continues the life cycle of the multi-university Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Intelligent Maintenance at the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan and the University of Missouri-Rolla. This I/UCRC is in the forefront of research on predictive monitoring and prognostic and decision support tools. The I/UCRC aims to maintain its commitment to intellectual and technical excellence by horizontally fostering stronger international partnerships and vertically deepening its impacts to the current members, as well as to the advancement of scientific knowledge and tools for next-generation autonomous maintenance systems.
The Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) was established in 2001 as an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC), through a partnership among the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Michigan. To date, the Center has conducted over 70 research projects with over 50 member companies and sponsors. The Center addresses the underlying issues in predictive monitoring and prognostic, and system-level maintenance decision support tools. Over the past 10 years, the Center has developed systematic methodologies and tools that made evident impacts to a number of member companies including Eaton, GM, Ford, Chrysler, and BorgWarner, amongst others. Research topics include: Battery prognostics and its management system Analysis of remanufacturing system with EV batteries Degradation-based battery management system for vehicle fleet companies Study on Maintenance Opportunity Windows for production systems Data-driven short-term bottleneck detection for intelligent maintenance decision-making The Center intends to advance the scientific base as well as to validate the developed tools to further accelerate the deployment and commercialization of the developed technologies. For example, our Center has worked in a successful collaboration with GM for more than ten years and two students from our Center have been hired by GM. As part of our effort with GM, our collaborators have received two "Boss" Kettering awards. We also worked with BorgWarner to reduce tooling cost on a shaving process by employing condition-based maintenance. As part of this project, we were able to demonstrate a potential cost-savings of more than $11,000 per tool per machine.
