Intelligent Maintenance Systems: The Next Five Years and Beyond

The evolution of maintenance has gone through different stages of transformation for the past decades. The traditional approach to maintaining components, equipment, and processes, has been one that is purely reactive. Mitigating procedures are performed on the equipment once it breaks down. Many manufacturing companies have been adopting condition-based maintenance (CBM) or predictive maintenance techniques (PdM) as the best practices. To transform maintenance to become a truly proactive and value-added productivity improvement, major innovation is needed to elevate the value to a new level. This paper will present recent advances of intelligent maintenance systems as well as its systematic methodology and tools that have been effectively utilized to transform maintenance into innovative and productive service systems in a diverse set of industries. Two brief case studies are provided to illustrate the lessons learned with discussions for future service innovation impacts.