Maintenance 4.0 in railway transportation industry

Transportation systems are complex with respect to technology and operations with involvement in a wide range of human actors, organisations and technical solutions. For the operations and control of such complex environments, a viable solution is to apply intelligent computerised systems, such as computerised traffic control systems for coordinating airline transportation, or advanced monitoring and diagnostic systems in vehicles. Moreover, transportation assets cannot compromise the safety of the passengers by applying operation and maintenance activities. Indeed safety becomes a more difficult goal to achieve using traditional maintenance strategies and computerised solutions come into the picture as the only option to deal with complex systems interacting among them trying to balance the growth in technical complexity together with stable and acceptable dependability indexes. Industry 4.0 is a term that describes the fourth generation of industrial activity which is enabled by smart systems and Internet-based solutions. Two of the characteristic features of Industry 4.0 are computerization by utilising cyber-physical systems and intelligent factories that are based on the concept of “internet of things”. Maintenance is one of the application areas, referred to as maintenance 4.0, in form of self-learning and smart systems that predicts failure, makes diagnosis and triggers maintenance by making use of “internet of things”. This paper discusses the possibilities that lie within applying the maintenance 4.0 concept in the railway transportation industry and the positive effects on technology, organisation and operations from a systems perspective.