Fundamentals of the eMaintenance Concept

Many intellectual, societal, business and technological forces are continuously pushing forward the frontiers of science. When being effectively combined, they may provide an umbrella for generating new fields and exploring new grounds. One such emerging field is eMaintenance. It is based on the fields from operation & maintenance engineering, software engineering, information systems, business management, and many other strongly varying fields related to the application domains of eMaintenance. As a novel field, eMaintenance addresses new needs and provides various benefits in form of increased availability, reduced lifecycle cost and increased customer-value. On the other hand, being in a continuous flux, it suffers from many infant illnesses in form of lack of or fuzzy definitions and theoretical foundations. This paper constitutes the first call to the eMaintenance community to gather their forces and commonly define the eMaintenance concept. As an initial step, it outlines its ten essential components. These are (1) Definition, (2) Business, (3) Organization, (4) Product, (5) Service, (6) Methodology, (7) Technology, (8) Information, (9) Customer, and (10) Education and Training. The paper also suggests a timeless definition of eMaintenance, it places eMaintenance in the context of other eDomains, and it elicits eMaintenance intellectual opportunities and challenges to be met by both the academia and industry when researching on or transitioning to the eMaintenance mode.