The Knowledge-Based Maintenance: An Approach for Reusing Experiences in Industrial Systems

The maintenance process plays a crucial role in any production process. Frequently, the common vision about the maintenance process takes only into account the probability of an event and the risk associated with some expected effects with the goal to reduce the effective cost. Nevertheless, maintenance is not a routine activity; it is a creative process that continually produces new knowledge. The traditional approaches to maintenance do not propose an explicit mechanism to preserve this knowledge. As a consequence, the experts managing the maintenance process face the problem to reinvent past solutions, instead of reusing their experiences to solve new problems. The lack of a learning process in the maintenance process produces the loss of knowledge, increases the dependency on some experts, but more important yet, it makes the evolution of the maintenance process more difficult. This chapter presents a Knowledge-Based Maintenance (KBM) approach that aims to create a framework to manage a maintenance program but also to preserve the valuable experience deployed in the maintenance activities.