The electronic maintenance situational awareness interface

The new technologies for maintenance can vastly improve safety and efficiency. E-Maintenance is a technology that can aggregate data from multiple databases. Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as a novel paradigms to enable “things” (any object with a computational device able of communicating) to communicate, exchanging data with each other. IoT can detect and read the environment and equipments in real time. These advances in technology can result in work practice improvements for maintenance technicians if they are well applied. To bring these technologies to technicians, a maintenance system needs to consider the data they actually need to perform better in their current context. The system´s User Interface needs to be goal-driven, providing the right information at the right time. This paper explores the challenge of delivering knowledge to technicians in a way that improves their efficiency and safety. It introduces a conceptual framework to Situation Awareness (SA) that can be applied in designing systems for maintenance technicians. This framework defines seven entities of importance (personal, procedure, equipments, system, environment, team and enterprise) in maintenance work and how they affect the user´s SA. The objective is to fill the current knowledge gap in studies of SA and assist the process of understanding data and situations of maintenance activities.