Large-scale E-maintenance: A new frontier for management?

E-maintenance refers to the adoption of ICT to enable the remote monitoring and control of industrial equipment and processes. Traditionally, e-maintenance solutions rely on expensive and proprietary Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) technologies, which present cost and interoperability issues that limit their adoption to large plants and industrial processes. However, recent developments in ICT have broadened the application field of e-maintenance, enabling its adoption for the management of large scale (relatively) small and low-cost machines. This opens up new terrific business opportunities, especially in the increasingly important after-sales services market. This paper aims to draw the attention of the network and service management community on the e-maintenance issue. We hope to provide some helpful information to attract the interest of researchers and practitioners and to stimulate further discussions and research efforts on this topic.