In the case of a high-valuable asset, the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase requires heavy charges and more efforts than the installation (construction) phase, because it has long usage life and any accident of an asset during this period causes catastrophic damage to an industry. Recently, with the advent of emerging Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), we can get the visibility of asset status information during its usage period. It gives us new challenging issues for improving the efficiency of asset operations. One issue is to implement the Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) approach that makes a diagnosis of the asset status based on wire or wireless monitored data, predicts the assets abnormality, and executes suitable maintenance actions such as repair and replacement before serious problems happen. In this study, we have addressed several aspects of CBM approach: definition, related international standards, procedure, and techniques with the introduction of some relevant case studies that we have carried out. & 2015 Society of CAD/CAM Engineers. Production and hosting by Elsevier. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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Ionic polymer–metal composites (IPMCs) have been considered for various applications due to their light weight, large bending, and low actuation voltage requirements. However, their response can be slow and vary widely, depending on various factors such as fabrication processes, water content, and contact conditions with the electrodes. In order to utilize their capability in various high-performance microelectromechanical systems, controllers need to address this uncertainty and non-repeatability while improving the response speed. In this work, we identified an empirical model for the dynamic relationship between the applied voltage and the IPMC beam deflection, which includes the uncertainties and variations of the response. Then, four types of controller were designed, and their performances were compared: a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller with optimized gains using a co-evolutionary algorithm, and three types of robust controller based on , with loop shaping, and μ-synthesis, respectively. Our results show that the robust control techniques can significantly improve the IPMC performance against non-repeatability or parametric uncertainties, in terms of the faster response and lower overshoot than the PID control, using lower actuation voltage.

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