A layered e-maintenance architecture powered by smart wireless monitoring components

Industrial asset lifecycle management is facing pressing demands to rationalize asset usage in parallel with meeting production, quality, safety, environment and cost-efficiency constraints. The introduction of enabling technologies, within an e-Maintenance framework is a significant contributor to this end. Among the key relevant technological factors are web-based maintenance services, wireless sensing and identification technologies, data and services integration and interoperability, as well as mobile and contextualized computing. Within such a framework, a layered e-Maintenance architecture is introduced, leveraging upon the strengths of smart and wireless components in order to upgrade the maintenance-services from the low level of operations, to the higher levels of planning and decision making.