Advanced Maintenance Services for Promoting Sustainability

Ecology and industry, which have been many times considered as antagonists, are now associated together in the sustainability concept to support the three social / economic / environment pillars. In that way, industrial enterprises and more precisely manufacturing ones seek to integrate environment into their strategy by conducting an innovative rationalization of the production as promoted by industrial ecology and circular economy paradigms. This rationalization is favoring the evolution from product to a Product-Service Systems approach (PSS). The continuity of these services is mainly carried out by the maintenance which is no longer an aftermarket service needed for product (system) functionality but rather an inherent service function of the product (system). Thus this paper aims to investigate the role of maintenance to contribute to the development of these paradigms. It is based first on describing the main features of industrial ecology/circular economy transposing the nature concepts to industrial system. It leads to define key principles and levers to be addressed for the development of industrial ecosystems. Then maintenance activity is globally presented allowing, in a second step, to place maintenance services already existing in line with some of these principles and levers (ex. green maintenance), but also to explore advanced maintenance services more able to support promotion of industrial ecosystem by covering others principles and levers. These advanced services can be built from conventional maintenance processes but integrating sustainability goal (ex. prognostics of energy efficiency) or from innovative processes (ex. regenerative management). Finally scientific issues related to these advanced maintenance services are underlining and should concretize future research directions for researchers/practitioners working on maintenance field. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.