Currently, there is a transition in industrial processes towards Industry 4.0. Manufacturing industries face several challenges, but the main goal is always to maximise asset availability. Today, poor maintenance strategies can reduce a plant’s overall productive capacity. Time-based preventive maintenance has proven to be an ineffective maintenance technique for most equipment components. Indeed, predictive maintenance is one of the main factors that will drive the fourth industrial revolution, making factories more efficient and productive, reducing unplanned downtime, improving reliability, and saving maintenance costs. Although predictive maintenance is a technology with promising results, its practical applicability is currently limited by the complex access to data from industrial equipment. The present project, first of all, aims for finding and developing a proper use case, despite not being in an industrial environment and not having access to real field devices. Electromechanical relays are used in many of today’s machines where control of high voltages and currents is intended. They are indeed important components in the context of automation, so it was found that the performance of accelerated life-test of electromechanical relays was a good use-case for predictive maintenance. This kind of life-test usually require dedicated hardware but in this project, it was proposed to conduct the experiments using standard automation components. SIMATIC Fail-Safe controllers and F-DI modules and its safety-related capabilities, even if they are not intended equipment for this purpose, were used to conduct an accelerated life test of general-purpose electromechanical relays based on the concept of discrepancy analysis. The present project proposes a solution based on a SIMATIC system with a CPU S7-1500 and F-IO modules, a setup with electromechanical relays to be tested and a single board computer. In order to enable the experiments, the vii firmware of the F-DI module was modified to monitor the operation of the relays throughout the experiment and stream the data to the single board computer for further data analysis. The experiments aim to observe whether it is possible to detect any change before the relay breaks. It was found that the time resolution achieved by the original firmware was not enough for the requirements of the project. To solve this issue, a new discrepancy algorithm was developed. Due to time constraints, it was only possible to perform a few experiments. Moreover, it was not possible to identify clear patterns that are common to all the experiments. Although the results of the experiments were not as satisfactory as could be expected, this work presents a proven solution that could be applied to other cases of use in the future. Moreover, this research could be extended by performing more experiments which allow concluding whether the performance of accelerated life tests of relays is a feasible concept
