Key technologies for enhancing test equipment reliability through digital management

Current management practices for automotive testing equipment facing several critical challenges, including high operational loads, frequent equipment failures, accelerated precision degradation, and delayed maintenance responses. Traditional time-based maintenance models present limitations, often resulting in either excessive maintenance or the inability to detect early-stage faults. Industry data indicate that approximately 40 percent of equipment failures are attributed to inadequate conditi on monitoring. This issue is particularly pronounced in high-load testing equipment, such as vehicle environmental chambers and dynamometer test benches, where operational stress accelerates aging and wear. The digital full-lifecycle management approach proposed in this study introduces advancements through three key stages. First, a real-time health assessment system based on multi-source sensing is developed, incorporating combined diagnostics such as current monitoring and infrared thermal imaging. This integration improves fault identification accuracy by 60 percent. Second, maintenance strategies are tailored to reflect actual equipment wear, thereby enabling dynamic adjustments to maintenance intervals. A case study demonstrated a 35 percent of reduction in over-maintenance hours through this approach. Third, an online equipment management system is established, leveraging historical fault data to train predictive models. This system contributes to a lifespan extension of over 20 percent for critical testing equipment. Implementation at an automotive manufacturing facility showed that the proposed methodology increased the mean time between failures from 800 hours to 1,100 hours and reduced annual maintenance costs by 30 percent. These results affirm the method’s effectiveness in enhancing th e reliability of testing data while simultaneously reducing total lifecycle costs.