e-Maintenance for ship electrical propulsion plants

Modern and efficient maintenance systems use advanced information and communication technologies in order to identify and minimize the causes of failures and eliminate the possibility of unplanned and costly breakdowns. With e-maintenance concept, productivity and effectiveness can be improved because the maintenance procedures are applied to the results obtained by the constant real time monitoring of system parameters. Computerized maintenance management systems allow fast, safe and relatively cheap gathering of the information necessary for the maintenance operations and sharing of knowledge between the parties involved in the maintenance process. By using an architecture oriented services such as e-monitoring, e-diagnostics, e-forecasting, e-logistics, etc., substantial savings can be obtained as a result of improved decision making at all management levels. Real time integration of key technologies that are part of the condition based maintenance and a predictive maintenance strategy with existing operational requirements and resources is a precondition for optimisation. In this paper, authors present an e-maintenance concept for ship electrical propulsion plants.