Decision Support Systems in maintenance: Fusion of business data and physical data

Maintenance optimization is critical for enhancing the effectiveness of asset management system. Maintenance effectiveness depends on the quality, timeliness, accuracy and completeness of information related to machine degradation state, based on which decisions are made. With emergence of intelligent sensors to measure and monitor the health state of the component and gradual implementation of information and communication technologies (lCT) in organizations conceptualization and implementation of e-maintenance is turning into a reality. While e-maintenance shows a lot of promise, seamless integration of ICT into the industrial environment remains a challenge. Computer Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are the core of traditional maintenance record-keeping practices and often facilitate the usage of textual descriptions of faults and actions performed on a vehicle. Recently developed Condition Monitoring Systems (CM) are capable of directly monitoring asset components parameters; however, attempts to link observed CMMS events to CM sensor measurements have been fairly limited in their approach and scalability. In this article, we present our approach for addressing this predicament. We argue that understanding the requirements and constraints in conjunction - from maintenance and ICT perspectives - is necessary. We identify the issues that need be addressed for achieving successful e-maintenance providing a new theoretical process for integrating the two disparate data types.