Maintenance 4.0: Where Are We? A Systematic Literature Review

Introduction

Maintenance plays an important role in every company or industry within the engineering field. By maintenance it is meant the necessary actions to retain or restore any functionality of a product to the specified operable condition, in order to achieve its maximum useful life. These actions can be technical, administrative and managerial (Komonen, 2002). In order to fulfil customer’s needs, maintenance had several developments, as it also is a required service that influences a company effectiveness. Therefore, over the years, technological developments allowed the change of maintenance service practices and its whole paradigm (Wan, Gao & Li, 2019).

In the recent decades, maintenance recognition as an effective part of a company competitiveness has grown. Several maintenance techniques were widely implemented to enhance production performance and to accomplish customers’ requirements (Waeyenbergh & Pintelon, 2002). Recent technology advances revolutionized the concept of maintenance in its whole sense, for instance, shortening time to market and customized mass production. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is the term given to the revolution that allowed a huge shift in maintenance and industry it-self. Therefore, the comprehension of this subject is mandatory to fully understand the aim of this paper.

According to (Peres et al., 2018) Industry 4.0 aims to introduce and take advantage of the interconnected world along the entire value chain, allowing the sharing and processing of the data avail-able in all of its actors to generate relevant knowledge and optimize the overall process (Peres et al., 2018). The term was carried by the German Government in 2012 and was also considered as the fourth industrial revolution. Governments and industries world-wide have noticed this trend and acted to benefit from what this new industrial revolution wave could provide (Yongxin Liao et al., 2017).

The four design principles of I4.0 that allow its implementation on maintenance are described by (Ashraf, 2018) as:

• 1.

  Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) concern the integration of physical processes and computational systems. CPS focuses on the digital part of a manufacturing system, more specifically, in real-time data acquisition, interaction and communication between physical and digital world. At the same time, these systems trans-late intelligent computations and cognitive decision from the digital to the physical world;

• 2.

  Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the wireless communication between sensors and computing devices through an inter-net network. IoT is the technical infrastructure of CPS, i.e., through CPS, IoT allows human and machine to be connected in a whole manufacturing system and enables the automation of maintenance decision-making;

• 3.

  Cloud computing provides, through the inter-net, high-speed data access and complex computing power for large-scale engineering problems. The cloud includes hardware storage, operating systems, program execution environment, testing, application development, databases, etc;

• 4.

  Big data covers the huge amount of data that is generated by enterprise resources like sensors or production and control systems and that is further stored on the cloud servers. Data from all these sources is complex, decentralized and fast moving, which makes human analytical capabilities insufficient to deal with the big volume of data. The key enablers of I4.0 are reasonably described through literature (pre-sent papers).

I4.0 aims at improving production efficiency and decreasing the related cost(Mohamed et al., 2019). Therefore, with I4.0 emergence, maintenance is a particular area of action that is required to successfully sustain a competitive advantage (Rødseth et al., 2017). As (Mohamed et al., 2019) mentioned, Maintenance 4.0 is a subgroup of I4.0 as it possesses self-learning and smart systems that predict failures, make diagnosis and trigger maintenance actions. A smart maintenance environment is enabled, mainly due to the deployment of CPS, which allows a high degree of networking, digitization, de-centralization, efficiency and availability. I4.0 is then expected to bring along several advantages to maintenance.