ABSTRACT
Eliminating costly unscheduled shutdown maintenances and accordingly reducing the failures of production systems as a whole help deliver the promises on ordered products. In the exploration of more efficient maintenance and service strategies, the approaches of condition-based proactive maintenance, collaborative maintenance, remote maintenance and service support, provision for real-time information access, and integration of production with maintenance have evolved into a new phenomenon called e-maintenance to meet the needs of the future e-automation manufacturing world. This paper introduces the emerging field of e-maintenance by studying its critical elements in support of the deployment of next generation manufacturing systems; we focus on industrial wireless technology and artificial intelligence, which are two essential technological means in the realization of scalable and agile e-maintenance. The technical issues and challenges involved for applying these technologies in an e-maintenance platform are explained. Finally, a framework for practical implementations is briefly presented.