Maintenance concepts evolution: a comparative review towards Advanced Maintenance conceptualization

The implementation of Industry 4.0-like solutions for the maintenance of production assets is a relevant topic in the mainstream for researchers and industries around the world. As a matter of facts, the technology-based transformation of maintenance has been germinated since several years. In fact, the evolution of maintenance along with the development of the information and communication technologies has been studied in the literature since early 2000, and concepts like e-maintenance and intelligent maintenance have been largely addressed. Nowadays, smart maintenance and maintenance 4.0 concepts are getting popular in the Industry 4.0-based literature. While e-maintenance, intelligent maintenance, smart maintenance and maintenance 4.0 are similar concepts, they are not identical. From an evolutionary perspective, there has been little consideration on whether the definition, connotation, and technical development of the concepts are consistent in the literature. To address this gap, the work performs a qualitative and quantitative investigation of the scientific literature to clarify the relationship among the different maintenance concepts. A bibliometric analysis of publication sources, annual publication numbers, keywords frequency, and top regions of research and development establishes the scope and trends of the currently presented research. Critical topics discussed include the evolutionary path of the different concepts. Moreover, the evidence collected through a case study involving eight production companies are discussed to report the perspective of industry about advanced maintenance, may it be defined 4.0, smart, intelligent or e-maintenance. Finally, a definition of the advanced maintenance concept is given, proposed as an integral approach inheriting the knowledge from past developments of e-maintenance and intelligent maintenance concepts and more recent developments including smart maintenance and maintenance 4.0