Designing Predictive Maintenance for Agricultural Machines

The Digital Transformation alters business models in all fields of application, but not all industries transform at the same speed. While recent innovations in smart products, big data, and machine learn-ing have profoundly transformed business models in the high-tech sector, less digitalized industries—like agriculture—have only begun to capitalize on these technologies. Inspired by predictive mainte-nance strategies for industrial equipment, the purpose of this paper is to design, implement, and evaluate a predictive maintenance method for agricultural machines that predicts future defects of a machine’s components, based on a data-driven analysis of service records. An evaluation with 3,407 real-world service records proves that the method predicts damaged parts with a mean accuracy of 86.34%. The artifact is an exaptation of previous design knowledge from high-tech industries to agriculture—a sector in which machines move through rough territory and adverse weather conditions, are utilized exten-sively for short periods, and do not provide sensor data to service providers. Deployed on a platform, the prediction method enables co-creating a predictive maintenance service that helps farmers to avoid resources shortages during harvest seasons, while service providers can plan and conduct maintenance service preemptively and with increased efficiency.