Patent ID: 7529642

Claim:
A method for evaluating quality of data collected in a manufacturing environment by a data collection system, the method comprising: (A) collecting raw data from a plurality of manufacturing equipment in the manufacturing environment according to a predefined Data Collection plan (DCPlan) specifying which data are to be collected, and for each data item in the collected raw data, a sampling time reference indicating at which time interval it is expected, and associating to each data item in the collected raw data a timestamp indicating the time at which it is actually collected, (B) for at least a portion of the collected raw data included inside a time window, determining a Data Collection Quality Value (DCQV) by: (a) reading timestamps of data items in the portion of the collected raw data; (b) computing at least one quality indicator value from a relationship between a timestamp and a corresponding time reference for each data item in the portion of the collected raw data, wherein a shift between a timestamp and a time reference for a data item in the portion of the collected raw data is representative of a malfunction of a manufacturing equipment in the plurality of manufacturing equipment or of the data collection system; (c) after steps (a) and (b) have been performed for all data items in the portion of the collected raw data, computing a single data collection quality value (DCQV) indicator for said time window.