The contribution of Industry 4.0 technologies to facility management

Facility management is an evolving discipline that has received attention from both professionals and researchers in recent years. Modern facility management considers various interests related to material resources, and among others, social and environmental interests. An important opportunity for the improvement of this discipline derives from the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies for the management of material resources. In this paper, we shall study the problem of industrial facility management, an area with important economic implications. Starting from a facility management model for the maintenance of industrial assets, we develop a general approach to maintenance based on the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems, which allows us to reason about the implementation of an effective Organisational Facility Management Unit. The objective is the continuous improvement of maintenance activities, from which also derives the improvement of the production process performance.