Maintenance Today and Future Trends

This chapter describes the state of the art in maintenance and its future trends. The key areas which have influenced maintenance in the last forty years are management of people and assets, and technological capability. These areas are important because they aim to make the best advantage of expensive resources, whether that advantage is profit, or to provide the best possible service with limited resource. The chapter first sets out the current range of maintenance in industrial practice. It is recognized that many businesses do not undertake the full extent of the work reported here: but it is our purpose to survey the state of the art. The chapter then continues to survey the influences of nascent technologies and ideas, before making some predictions about the future. Indeed, some of the most advanced condition based maintenance effectively aims to predict the future, but here we do not offer a crystal ball calibrated to international standards: we will constrain ourselves to informed, independent opinion