On the concept of e-maintenance: Review and current research

Abstract

The importance of the maintenance 1 1 The maintenance terminology used in this paper is extracted from the European standard EN 13306:2001 de/fr/en European Standard on Maintenance Terminology. function has increased because of its role in keeping and improving system availability and safety, as well as product quality. To support this role, the development of the communication and information technologies has allowed the emergence of the concept of e-maintenance. Within the era of e-manufacturing and e-business, e-maintenance provides the opportunity for a new maintenance generation. As we will discuss later in this paper, e-maintenance integrates existing telemaintenance principles, with Web services and modern e-collaboration principles. Collaboration allows to share and exchange not only information but also knowledge and (e)-intelligence. By means of a collaborative environment, pertinent knowledge and intelligence become available and usable at the right place and time, in order to facilitate reaching the best maintenance decisions. This paper outlines the basic ideas within the e-maintenance concept and then provides an overview 2 2 Last year, within a current research project called “Modelling policies for the improvement of production systems dependability” (Project number DPI 2004-01843) and sponsored by the Spanish government, we have launched a call for paper on e-maintenance to better understand the nature and the impact of the e-maintenance phenomenon. The results were presented in different conferences and some of them are published within a special issue on e-maintenance for Computers in Industry, Guest Editors B. Iung and A. Crespo Marquez [1]. of the current research and challenges in this emerging field. An underlying objective is to identify the industrial/academic actors involved in the technological, organizational or management issues related to the development of e-maintenance. Today, this heterogeneous community has to be federated in order to bring up e-maintenance as a new scientific discipline.