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Integration Project by Professor Andy Koronios

Monday, September 01, 2008 By Matt Webb

System Integration both at the technical and the business process levels is critically important to most organisations today with much research placing it as the one of the top business and IT issues. Engineering asset managing organisations are no different. Indeed there has, in the past, been a greater chasm between the transactional (at the maintenance level) systems and the tactical and strategic levels of the asset management organisations. Thus it is almost impossible to make evidence based strategic decisions about the asset’s lifecycle.

Furthermore, there exists a plethora of data about assets which are in a large number of distributed environments with a variety of data formats and in most cases non-interoperable due to the lack of standards. Much of the data is indeed unstructured in nature and in many cases in paper format only.This project contributes to the integration of both structured and unstructured data about assets and to the harmonisation or interoperability across all the levels of organisational interaction.Harmonisation or interoperability of standards is achieved through mapping or harmonising the terminology used to describe the assets, i.e., the ontology. In this context, The ISO 15926 and MIMOSA standards will be used to achieve integration and will be demonstrated in industry case studies.The project outputs will provide guidance in the development of a Masted Data Management system for asset management as represented in the figure below.

A number of researchers are involved in this project bringing together diverse skills in computer science, engineering and human dimensions from Queensland University of Technology, the University of South Australia as well as the University of Western Australia and industry partners such as ANSTO, Sunwater & QR.

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