A maintenance policy selection method enhanced by industry 4.0 technologies

One of the objectives of the manufacturing system is to maximize the profit. Maintenance management is a key element to achieve this goal because it reduces the machines downtime, improving the overall equipment effectiveness of the production systems. The advances in information and communication technologies, which paved the way to “the fourth industrial revolution”, provide to the experts new tools for the monitoring and analysis of the items’ status of functioning. Nowadays, many companies still perform simply the corrective maintenance policies; this is due, mainly, to the difficulty to collect data and to process these data for scheduling the work orders and for assigning the best maintenance policy to each asset. The aim of this paper is to present a new maintenance framework that is able to automate the decision process leading to the choice of the more appropriate maintenance strategy among those belonging to the statistically and reliability based preventive maintenance and the newer opportunistic maintenance approach