NEXT GENERATION MAINTENANCE THROUGH THE ADOPTION OF E- MAINTENANCE

SUMMARY 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 R FID technology help the maintenance engineer to assimil ate many different information sources, enhancing t he quality and cost effectiveness of maintenance decis ions. With the help of personal digital assistants (PDA) the maintenance engineer is offered not only highly eff icient and practical monitoring and diagnosis tools , but also direct assistance on how to carry out the maintenan ce tasks effectively and reliably so that the possi bility of introducing faults during the execution of maintena nce tasks is also minimized. The introduction of ma intenance e-training provides additional tools to achieve thi s aim. Key to the implementation of e-maintenance i s the combined use of web services and interoperability s tandards, enabling data and intelligent processes s ervice integration (monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis) in a distributed manner, with smart embedded services. Such devices, services and data integration duly takes i nto account local or remote information, as well as input from intelligent predictive planning systems, in order t o optimize maintenance costs, operational reliabili ty 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 res ults of a highly successful EU IP project DYNAMITE (Dynamic Decisions in Maintenance), where a flexible emaintenance framework was developed and demonstrated at different end users and application scenarios.