Maintenance activities in the Japanese public utilities

Maintenance requires high costs and large human resources including laborious and dirty work. However, if one reconsiders maintenance in the context of the inverse manufacturing, it becomes a strong and positive approach for realizing inverse manufacturing, because it can drastically reduce waste by extending the life times of products and create new business opportunities at later stages of product life cycles. This paper surveys the current maintenance activities of the Japanese pubic utility sector and clarifies its critical situation in which increase of maintenance costs and decrease of quality of service are inevitable if they do not change their maintenance strategies. In order to solve this problem, the maintenance should be reconsidered from the viewpoint of total life cycle of the whole utility system. For this purpose, this paper proposes the concept of “maintenance centered facility life cycle” and discusses its essential topics