Next Generation Maintenance through the Adaption of E-Maintenance

A remarkable step forward in maintenance has been taken through the adoption of e-maintenance techniques. The new methodology enables the efficient use of maintenance related information and services wherever and whenever they are needed. New monitoring techniques together with advanced use of mobile devices and RFID technology help the maintenance engineer to assimilate many different information sources, enhancing the quality and cost effectiveness of maintenance decisions. With the help of personal digital assistants (PDA) the maintenance engineer is offered not only highly efficient and practical monitoring and diagnosis tools, but also direct assistance on how to carry out the maintenance tasks effectively and reliably so that the possibility of introducing faults during the execution of maintenance tasks is also minimized. The introduction of maintenance e-training provides additional tools to achieve this aim. Key to the implementation of e-maintenance is the combined use of web services and interoperability standards, enabling data and intelligent processes service integration (monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis) in a distributed manner, with smart embedded services. Such devices, services and data integration duly takes into account local or remote information, as well as input from intelligent predictive planning systems, in order to optimize maintenance costs, operational reliability and availability. The decisions made by the engineer in the field are therefore well-informed, based upon up-to-date information and take a holistic view of the overall maintenance strategy. The paper summarizes the results of a highly successful EU IP project DYNAMITE (Dynamic Decisions in Maintenance), where a flexible e-maintenance framework was developed and demonstrated at different end users and application scenarios.