Environmental assessment of consequences from predictive maintenance with artificial intelligence techniques : Importance of the system boundary

This paper analyses a case of maintenance planning that was researched in previous work and thereby improved using predictive maintenance with an artificial intelligence (AI) technique. In particular, the en- vironmental implications are presented using a life cycle assessment. Using AI to develop maintenance planning could be a feasible method that can outperform other strategies. However, the results of this analysis show that the economic and environmental performance depends largely on the assessment set- ting. Therefore, applying appropriate system boundaries and functional unit is of major importance to avoid sub-optimization when maintenance planning is developed