Development of an e-maintenance system integrating advanced techniques

In recent years, globalization and fast growth of communication technologies, computer and information technologies have changed the pattern of maintenance. Accordingly, a new maintenance, e-maintenance has emerged and has been gradually replacing the traditional maintenance. In this paper, a new e-maintenance system is proposed that is dependent upon coordination, co-operation and negotiation through the use of Internet and tether-free (i.e. wireless, web, etc.) communication technologies. This e-maintenance enables manufacturing operations to achieve near-zero-downtime performance on a sharable, quick and convenient platform through integrating the existent advanced technologies with distributed sources. The main difference between the proposed e-maintenance and existing systems is the system structure. This e-maintenance consists of two subsystems: maintenance centre and local maintenance. The relationship of both subsystems can be considered as supplier and clients. This division can effectively reduce maintenance cost, maintenance system design period, and solve the problem of lack of experts. Therefore, the competition of company can be increased due to high reliability of e-maintenance. Some existing modules of this e-maintenance demonstrate its feasibility. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.