The high potential recorded by desert of Algeria in terms of sun exposure offers scope to exploit this source of renewable energy to answer the needs for water supply and public lighting in isolated populations. Our objective is to guarantee the reliability of the photovoltaic power generation equipments located in remote and isolated areas, including photovoltaic pumping stations, expected to supply water to local people for human consumption and for livestock from drilling isolated. Thus, we are focused particularly on the reliability of these systems and their maintenance in operational mode. The introduction of the e-maintenance can reduce cost and time management of equipment, and provide easy access to relevant information for the user by freeing up geographical constraints. Our study aims to introduce the techniques proposed by the e-Maintenance, to improve the management of the maintenance process. In this project a cooperative distributed platform of e-maintenance is proposed, including data acquisition systems, control, maintenance management, diagnosis assistance, management of documentation, etc. An e-maintenance platform is a collaboration platform offering a set of software components and software services for maintenance support (integrated and/or distant) all enable maintenance actors to find each other, and the information they need, and to be able to communicate and work together to achieve maintenance process. In this platform, the process of the various modules must be designed following a process of knowledge capitalization and data processing to ensure the diagnosis and prognosis of the pumping system of the Photovoltaic system and thus ensure its reliability. This processing chain will be tested in a first time in a mini-solar station to show the feasibility of the approach. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of The TerraGreen Society.
