Patent ID: 7162312

Claim:
A method for predictive recognition of errors in a manufacturing system, said method comprising the steps of: archiving a plurality of error patterns that previously occurred in the manufacturing system, the archived error patterns created by statistical methods; monitoring manufacturing system data in real-time; maintaining an evaluation unit with input data that defines functional relationships of plant components, on-site relationships of plant components, hierarchical relationships between controllers and field devices, and relationships between enterprise resource planning and manufacturing execution systems, wherein conditions for the manufacturing system data to be monitored are defined in the evaluation unit and submitted to peripheral devices in the manufacturing system based on a hierarchical plant model, plant topology, and automation topology to reduce the amount of the manufacturing system data to be analyzed by the evaluation unit; comparing the monitored data with the archived error patterns in real-time to predict imminent errors likely to occur in the manufacturing system; providing recommended actions to prevent the predicted imminent errors; and refining the plurality of error patterns in an automated learning module that receives indications of relevance in matching of the monitored data to the archived error patterns and receives indications of success of the error predictions and recommended actions, and automatically modifies the archived error patterns to improve the relevance indications and the success indications.