9. Developing Maintenance Applications

“Data is a burden, knowledge is an asset.” Operators and manufacturers of complex equipment often collect data about the equipment they maintain: technical follow-up files, breakdown files, intervention reports, preventive maintenance reports, and records of requests from their clients or distributors. Unfortunately, this information is usually not well exploited. This is due both to the complexity of the equipment itself and to the type of technicians who carry out the maintenance processes. In this chapter, we explore a recipe for this category of problems, with a specific case structure and modeling approach, as well as typical problems for linking the developed maintenance system to both on-board equipment and technical information.