Evolution of Technical Systems Maintenance Approaches – Review and a Case Study

The importance of technical objects maintenance issues takes on particular significance in the area of increasing competition an increasingly higher demands in the area of quality, reliability and productivity of performed system’s functions and tasks. The main objectives of maintenance have evolved for the last fifty years. Thus, the article is aimed at the investigation of maintenance approaches evolution. The authors focus on the presentation of basic literature review covering the main maintenance approaches, from Maintenance 1.0 to Maintenance 4.0. First, the authors provide the reader with the main definitions connected with this research area and present few classifications of maintenance strategies with their historical background. The presented state of art was based on a review of available literature sources in the form of non-serial publications, scientific journals publications and conference proceedings. As a result, an overview of the literature includes the issues published in different times of the last forty years, and investigates the most well-known maintenance problems. Later, a simple case study on transportation company’s maintenance management issues is provided.