Recognizing Life Cycle Benefits of Real Time Fatigue Monitoring for Ecosystems

Abstract

Real time fatigue monitoring creates various benefits in multiple categories appearing at different points of the item’s life cycle. One monitoring and analytics service can be beneficial for a large set of actors, an ecosystem. An ecosystem consists of actors that work towards a common goal, a focal value proposition. In our case, this focal value proposition is management of an item’s life cycle in real time. The purpose of this paper is to recognize benefits related to real time monitoring and analytics of fatigue in welded steel structures and to recognize a set of actors that can form a new ecosystem for creating these benefits. The benefits are recognized in interviews with practitioners who observe the lack of reliable analytics in the remaining life of the items they design, manufacture, maintain or operate. The interviewees represent different parts of an item’s life cycle and during the interviews are asked to recognize and rank benefits and to form a potential new ecosystem from their perspective. The recognized benefits are for example in improving communication between product design and production, improved maintenance scheduling, prolonged production time, correctly timed replacement investment decisions. The interviewees do not form a unified opinion of a new ecosystem but rather we recognize two categories of companies that form the basis for future research in the subject. The interviewees agree that real time monitoring holds huge potential for benefits but is not yet adopted in large scale in practice.