Abstract
Most e-maintenance approaches are oriented to big industries and are prohibitive for modest industries. This paper proposes an architecture for e-maintenance that tries to solve this gap. This architecture defines two domains, the floor-shop and the cloud domain. In the floor-shop domain, a mobile device is connected to the system to be maintained by means of a tether-free process interface. On the other hand, the cloud domain provides the resources to improve the maintenance in instrumented manufacturing systems via Internet connection. Also, the mobile device is responsible for joining both domains through its Internet capabilities. The proposed architecture combines mobile devices, cloud computing and Internet connectivity, allowing fresh technicians to supply its lack of expertise, reducing maintenance task time and minimizing the expert technician dependency. The expert now changes his role because his physical presence at the floor-shop domain is not required, being his know-how incorporated to the system. The proposal is human-centric, providing an intuitive usability such as any typical smartphone app. The results show that it is feasible to reduce drastically the economic requirements for deploying complex e-maintenance infrastructures, increasing the quality of the maintenance and enabling the applicability to small factories where maintenance is mostly outsourced. This is translated to higher availability and productivity of the manufacturing plant.
