RMDM (Reliability Maintenance Data Model)

Overview

RMDM (Reliability Maintenance Data Model) provides a standardized data model for maintenance and reliability use cases in Cognite Data Fusion (CDF). It extends Cognite's common data models with maintenance, equipment, and failure-analysis concepts aligned with ISO 14224 and NORSOK Z-008 standards. By deploying RMDM, Value Delivery teams can establish a consistent foundation for troubleshooting, root cause analysis (RCA), and condition-based maintenance initiatives without designing a maintenance data model from scratch.

Who is this for & when to use

Target personas: Delivery Engineer, Data Modeller, CDF Administrator on a reliability and maintenance project.

Use this pack when:

• Setting up a new CDF project for reliability or maintenance use cases and you need a standardized data model without building it from scratch.
• Your project requires Root Cause Analysis (RCA), condition-based maintenance (CBM), or failure analysis workflows.
• You need to integrate maintenance data from CMMS platforms, historians, DCS systems, and engineering databases into a unified, queryable structure.
• Extending an existing CDF project with a standardized maintenance, equipment, and failure-analysis data model aligned with ISO 14224 and NORSOK Z-008.

When NOT to use this pack:

• If your project is manufacturing-focused — use the ISA Manufacturing Data Model deployment pack instead.
• If your project is oil & gas operations with AVEVA, SAP, and PI source systems — use the CFIHOS Oil & Gas Data Model deployment pack instead.

Why you need it

Maintenance and reliability data is often distributed across multiple systems such as CMMS platforms, historians, DCS systems, and engineering databases. Without a standardized data model, teams spend significant effort defining data structures, aligning terminology, and creating relationships between maintenance records, equipment, and failure information.

RMDM reduces this effort by providing a predefined industry-aligned model that:

• Covers the full ISO 14224 failure analysis taxonomy — FailureMode, FailureCause, FailureMechanism, and FailureNotification are pre-wired as first-class views, linked to equipment and maintenance orders without custom schema work.
• Extends CDM and IDM directly — every view implements a standard Cognite interface (CogniteAsset, CogniteEquipment, CogniteMaintenanceOrder, CogniteNotification, etc.), ensuring compatibility with CDF Search, Canvas, and AI tooling out of the box.
• Prevents structural divergence across projects — all reliability and maintenance projects start from the same validated baseline, making cross-project comparison and reuse straightforward.
• Deploys in minutes, not weeks — no schema design iterations, no container/view alignment work, and no CDM/IDM extension wiring to figure out.
• Designed to extend — the module is intentionally a starting point: add properties to existing containers, create new views, or wire up transformations and a workflow as your project evolves.

What's included

Prerequisites

Verify all of the following before starting deployment:

• Cognite Toolkit version 0.8 or later is installed. Follow the setup instructions.
• A cdf.toml file exists in your project root. If missing, run cdf init and select Create toml file (required).
• Authentication is configured and verified — run cdf auth init and cdf auth verify using a local .env file. See the Toolkit authentication docs.
• Your CDF project has Data Modeling enabled.
• The CDF group used by Toolkit has the following capabilities: spaces:write, datamodels:write, datasets:write, rawdb:write.

Deployment & installation

Choose your setup path

1. Existing Toolkit project

Use this path if you already have a local Toolkit project and only want to add the RMDM data model.

a. Point cdf.toml at the Cognite Library

Long-time Toolkit users may still have [library.cognite] pointing at toolkit-data. Update it to the official library release:

[library.cognite]
url = "https://github.com/cognitedata/library/releases/download/latest/packages.zip"

b. Enable deployment packs in cdf.toml

In the same cdf.toml, ensure the alpha flag is set:

[alpha_flags]
deployment-pack = true

c. Add the RMDM module

From your project directory:

cdf modules add -d rmdm

d. Build and deploy

Run in order:

cdf build
cdf deploy --dry-run
cdf deploy

After deployment, the RMDM data model, containers, and views are available in your CDF environment.

Verify folder structure

Your project should include:

modules/
└── data_models/
    └── rmdm/

2. Starting from scratch

Use this path for a new Toolkit project with only the RMDM data model (and the data models pack scaffolding Toolkit creates).

a. Initialize the project

In an empty directory:

cdf modules init .

b. Select RMDM in the interactive UI

In the terminal:

• Choose Data models (data models that extend the core data model).
• Use Space to select RMDM.
• Press Enter to confirm.

Toolkit downloads the library, creates the module under modules/data_models/rmdm/, and updates config.dev.yaml / config.prod.yaml.

c. Build and deploy

cdf build
cdf deploy --dry-run
cdf deploy

After either path, the RMDM space, data model, containers, and views are deployed to your CDF environment.

Verification

After deployment, perform the following checks:

1. Verify that the deployment completed successfully. The cdf deploy command should finish without errors and report successful deployment of spaces, containers, views, and data models.
2. In Cognite Data Fusion, navigate to:
   Data Modeling → Spaces
   Verify that the rmdm space exists.
3. Navigate to:
   Data Modeling → Data Models
   Verify that the RMDM data model is available.
4. Open the RMDM data model and verify that entities such as Equipment, FailureMode, FailureCause, and MaintenanceOrder are present.
5. Navigate to:
   Data Modeling → Containers
   Verify that the expected RMDM containers have been deployed.
6. Navigate to:
   Data Modeling → Views
   Verify that the expected RMDM views have been deployed.

The deployment is successful when the RMDM space, data model, containers, and views are visible in CDF and can be opened without errors.

Configuration reference

Parameters are set in config.dev.yaml at the project root. Default values work for an initial test deployment.

Architecture

RMDM is deployed as a single Cognite Toolkit module containing a dedicated space, data model, 13 containers, and 13 views. The module is schema-only — it defines the data structure and CDM/IDM extensions, and does not bundle transformations or a workflow. Data instances are populated separately using transformations or the CDF API once source systems are connected.

CDM extensions (cdf_cdm)

IDM extensions (cdf_idm)

Domain-specific views

Key design decisions

Schema-only module. RMDM deploys the data structure and CDM/IDM extensions only — no transformations or workflow are bundled. This keeps the module lightweight and applicable across any source system combination. Transformations and a workflow can be added per project once the source schema is known.

Single asset hierarchy via Asset. Only Asset implements CogniteAsset. All other entities (Equipment, MaintenanceOrder, FailureNotification) link to assets via direct relations, preserving a clean single-hierarchy navigation pattern in CDF applications.

ISO 14224 failure taxonomy as first-class views. FailureMode, FailureCause, and FailureMechanism are independent views with their own containers — not properties on Notification. This allows reuse across multiple notifications, and enables RCA aggregations across the failure taxonomy without duplicating data.

Troubleshooting

Support & ownership