E-Maintenance
As organizations are becoming increasingly conscious of the need to make more efficient usage of resources, with improved energy-efficiency, while satisfying quality and safety requirements, they are more likely to benefit from the introduction of e-Maintenance technologies and solutions. Maintaining adequate asset operational condition, while meeting performance, normative/legislative, cost, quality and safety requirements, defines a complex decision-making landscape, brittle enough to be influenced by changes or disturbances introduced along the way. The integration of wireless and mobile technologies with web-based programming has enabled e-Maintenance to emerge as a powerful technological framework to support modern industrial Maintenance and Asset Management engineering practice. e-Maintenance supports life cycle asset management by making related services and information ubiquitously available. From the low level of field operations to the higher level of decision making and maintenance planning, e-Maintenance facilitates seamless integration of data, services and actors, thus empowering enterprises to design, plan, execute and re-align their asset management activities, on the basis of the enterprise maintenance management strategy and in the light of the most relevant and timely information, engaging the right actors and stakeholders and supporting them with tools at all layers of the maintenance function.
The WelCOM project is a concerted effort in the field that aims to facilitate the implementation of a Condition – Based Maintenance Strategy (CBM) within an e-Maintenance framework, employing a flexible toolset of software and hardware solutions based on Wireless Sensor Networks and Mobile Devices.