A critical study of the existing issues in manufacturing maintenance systems: Can BIM fill the gap?

Abstract The use of smart and complicated technologies in manufacturing industries has brought new issues to the maintenance systems in recent years. In this research, an intensive literature review is performed to identify and classify these issues. Inspired by the recent advances that Building Information Modeling (BIM) has brought to the construction industry, the research proposes adopting BIM in manufacturing maintenance systems to address the existing issues. A list of BIM capabilities utilized for addressing maintenance issues of buildings is extracted from the literature. It is argued that these BIM capabilities can also solve similar maintenance issues found in manufacturing industries. A BIM-based corrective maintenance model for an aluminum casting plant is developed to investigate the application of sample BIM capabilities in a manufacturing maintenance system. Twenty maintenance experts are invited to interact with the developed pilot model. Rapid locating of equipment requiring repairs, easy access to documents and records, efficient collaborative cloud environment, and expedited operations are among the identified advantages of BIM capabilities in the case. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a comprehensive list of categorized manufacturing maintenance issues. Nominated BIM capabilities to address the identified manufacturing maintenance issues are recommended. The achieved results of this research can inspire manufacturing maintenance practitioners and researchers to adopt similar technologies to BIM to improve manufacturing maintenance systems.