Condition based maintenance is regarded as a maintenance strategy that through measured component wear balances availability and accurate operation with necessary maintenance operations. In industrial settings there can be hundreds or thousands of objects to monitor, and systems that are distributed into different networks are seldom compatible. This paper proposes a condition monitoring system based on standardized services operating as parts of a service framework. The solution builds on dynamic service composition as well as standard information models for measurement related data, and supports functionality from sensors to cloud applications. The approach has been applied to industrial processing in mining and it can be claimed to improve interoperability as well as reduce engineering effort when composing functionality supporting maintenance operations.

Condition monitoring and maintenance of devices and equipment is an important aspect of operating a production facility affecting the availability of production systems. Modern production environments can consist of thousands of devices that each need to be monitored so that maintenance can be performed when necessary to sustain a cost-effective state of production. Today operation and maintenance (O&M) is typically outsourced, and equipment and device manufacturers have also entered the service business. This brings challenges in managing a multitude of different devices using different protocols as well as in the varying needs for utilizing this information in enterprise functions and services. Based on OPC Unified Architecture (UA) a scalable architecture is developed for providing device status information of heterogeneous field devices and sensors to enterprise level applications and services. A proof of concept implementation of this architecture is presented and its envisioned adoption in a mine environment is discussed.

Template meta-programming techniques can be used to increase efficiency in software development. These techniques have traditionally been used with textual programming languages, such as C++. In this paper, we discuss how corresponding techniques can be used with visual languages. The visual language under study in this paper is function block language (FBL). FBL is used in Metso Automation for writing automation control programs that are executed in realtime distributed environments. Efficient development of high quality programs and easy customizability of existing programs are key requirements in practical customer projects. These requirements have been one of the main motivations to develop template meta-programming support in FBL discussed. In this paper, we focus both on the technical aspects and on the lessons learnt from programmers' experiences and ways to work with templates. FBL and the programming techniques proposed have been used in hundreds of real-world projects at Metso Automation.