Maintenance

This book is for everybody who wants to apply the state of the art in the fast-evolving field of maintenance. It is high time for a new kind of doing maintenance, because our society needs it and the theories and applications exist. The irony of maintenance is that when maintenance is done perfectly, nobody notices it. While when, on the contrary, it fails completely, then our entire society comes to a standstill. Bridges collapse, trains don’t run, factories cannot produce, energy is failing, communication becomes impossible, hospitals can’t work and even agriculture stops. Such scenarios are becoming more realistic every day, as aging assets and workforce combine with greater environmental and political instability.

The good news is that maintenance can be done much smarter and better than current practice. Indeed, smart maintenance can make an active contribution to more sustainable solutions all along the life cycle of assets. This new way combines intensive use of both digitization and social innovation. This book shows the many aspects of this new kind of maintenance. It introduces theories and practical insights from a wide variety of fields. From engineering, its founding discipline, but also from information systems, as smart maintenance leverages digitization and data. And from economics and management, because often business reasons limit innovation in maintenance. Last but not least, also human and organizational behavior is crucial for successful use of smart maintenance and this book also contains key insights from these fields.

The 20 chapters in this book form the joint achievement of over two dozen authors from a variety of academic backgrounds, mostly from Dutch universities and knowledge institutes. This book forms the tangible culmination of a 15-year long fruitful collaboration, under the guidance of the Dutch World Class Maintenance foundation. Its primary intended use is education at the university Bachelor level, both for regular and life-long learning education, but this Open Access text can be used in a wide variety of educational contexts.