Man-Machine Fusion Techniques Based On Virtual Reality And Agent In Maintenance Of Power Plants

Considering the current maintenance mechanism of hydropower plants, a more reasonable maintenance mechanism is proposed in order to improve reliability and optimize economic effect. The main idea is to reduce scheduled maintenance, avoid breakdown maintenance, move to condition-based maintenance, and advocate optimal maintenance by sharing multiple maintenance mechanisms. According to the requirements and characteristics from maintenance information system of hydropower plants, new man-machine fusion techniques based on virtual reality and intelligent agent are adopted in the research of the maintenance system for hydropower plants in order to provide more friendly and effective interface among men, machines and expert systems.The problem, purpose and significance of this research are firstly presented. State of the arts of hydropower plants maintenance technologies is introduced. The new technology, such as intelligent agents and virtual reality technologies and their applications are presented. From the engineering point of view, the feasibility and necessity of application of virtual reality to hydropower plants maintenance is discussed. At last, the research work and significance is presented in this chapter.In the second chapter, the system structure of information integration based on intelligent agents is presented in order to facilitate information integration and improve system flexibility of maintenance decision information system of hydropower plants. Also presented is agent structure, which includes interface layer, collaboration layer and data layer. And each layer is comprised of multiple agents. This system structure has better configuration and multiple agents system has strong capabilities including perception, interpretation, reasoning etc. Therefore, maintenance decision-making information system of hydropower plants has strong ability to facilitate information accessing and integrating.The effective and friendly human machine interface technique is the key to improve overall system efficiency. In order to satisfy the requirements coming from information representation of hydropower plants maintenance system, in this chapter it is proposed that intelligent agents, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and virtual reality should be integrated and collaborated with each other. In this intelligent distributed cooperative virtual maintenance environment, operators are provided the maintenance information represented by 3-dimentional visualization techniques. So the operator can obtain both immersion and near real-world feeling. The user interface of maintenance agent became friendly by representing information, knowledge and CSCW with multiple dimensional data to information exchanging. Considering the characteristics of maintenance information system and requirements of virtual reality, hybrid rendering based on geometry and image is proposed after detailed analysis of geometry and image based rendering techniques. With regard to the real requirement from hydropower plants maintenance system, a detailed discussion of real-time rendering and motion control methods of virtual maintenance scene of interface agent is presented.Condition-based maintenance is a systematic project, and the information coming from equipments condition, water and market must all be taken into account. This chapter first analyzed the changes of condition monitoring, interactive diagnosis and maintenance decision-making in order to carry out condition-based maintenance, and then point out the key to successfully carry out condition-based maintenance. In order to addressing these problems, the methodology of intelligent agents based on virtual reality is comprehensively discussed. The purpose, function and system structure of virtual reality based intelligent maintenance decision-making support system (vrIMDSS) is detailed studied.Taking advantage of the research results of previous chapters, condition-based maintenance of GEZHOUBA Hydropower Plants is investigated. The system schematic structure of Optimal...