Technology Concepts to Improve Knowledge Sharing During Maintenance

Industrial maintenance is a complex and knowledge-intensive field. Maintenance technicians need to have special professional skills and easy access to versatile and situationally relevant knowledge. The aim of this paper is to understand the nature and needs of maintenance work and to propose new technology concepts so as to support knowledge gathering and sharing. As a result of studies in two maintenance cases, it was found that communication between different actors is a key element in maintenance. Therefore, three different technology concepts were proposed in order to support and enhance communication. These concepts include augmented reality and wearable technologies that will provide new and efficient ways to help maintenance technicians in gathering and sharing task-specific information and long-term knowledge. In the next phase of this on-going research project, these technology concepts will be tested and evaluated with maintenance technicians