Known methods of monitoring a plant include maintenance personnel walking around the plant for assessment purposes based on human observations.
Experienced maintenance staff may detect deviations from normal operating conditions such as unusually loud pumps and drives or unusual vibrations of a plant component and report those observations.
But usually those observations are not stored for future reference and therefore no long term trend analysis can be applied.
Furthermore slight deviations cannot be tracked and changes in maintenance staff may lead to conclusion failures since observations of different persons are usually not compared to each other or transferred towards a “neutral” observation, or are simply not comparable and/or transferable.