Integrated Maintenance: analysis and perspective of innovation in railway sector
This work targets cost reduction and efficiency improvements in railway maintenance, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing maintenance concepts.
The paper addresses the high costs of managing complex industrial control systems by proposing a general maintenance approach and its specific application to the railway sector, aiming to enhance maintenance processes and integrate them with production and operations.
The high costs for the management of the modern and complex industrial control systems make it necessary to enhance the current maintenance processes. Therefore, the need arises to clearly define the goals of the maintenance, in order to evolve and continuously enhance the management methods, to efficiently integrate the maintenance activities with the ones related to the production, the service provisioning, and the operation, and to use smart computer-based maintenance systems. This paper proposes a general maintenance approach and its specific application to the railway sector.