Maintenance database

Maintenance activities represent an increasingly high cost in any manufacturing system or in different types of structures. Its achievement or not has a major impact on availability of equipment or structures. Nowadays cost reduction, minimizing downtime and ensuring reliability levels are central objectives in any sector of industrial activity and maintenance is observed as an important service. To achieve these goals, decision support systems should be available, optimizing the exploration and maintenance plans and ensuring companies meeting their goals. For this it is necessary to make collections of reliable and consistent data. Its analysis and treatment will allow to compute reliability values, to validate FMECA and re-plan production and maintenance. This paper focuses on the need for the existence of a maintenance database and proposes an architecture for connecting the multiple vertices that generate information to feed the database. The architecture presented should drive developments in building a platform that ensures data to be collected and processed and to link OEM, customers and maintenance providers, as shareholders of maintenance database and with the responsibility in feeding it with data during different phases of the product life cycle. The existence of a maintenance database will provides reliable information for analysis and will contribute significantly to plan the installation phase of equipment and its use. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.