A Systematic Mapping Study of Predictive Maintenance in SMEs

The rapid growth of Industry 4.0 and predictive methods fostered a great potential for state-of-the-art techniques in the industrial sector, especially in smart factories. The equipment failure or system breakdowns during run time of a factory creates a severe problems towards impoverishment of the production system and destitution of the business. Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is a cost-saving and data driven technique to predict the maintenance time of in-service equipment or systems to reduce breakdown time and increase productivity. Although PdM is pragmatically adopted in large-scale industries, there is a lack of studies that map the PdM adoption in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this systematic mapping study (SMS), we focus on predictive maintenance from an SME perspective to explore the field for researchers, scientists, and developers to comprehend the potential of PdM systems, their challenges, distinctive characteristics, and best practices in SMEs. Our study is based on four research questions comprised of demographic data, key challenges, distinctive characteristics, and best practices of predictive maintenance in SMEs. We found that the current literature on PdM is deficient in the SME domain, especially the financial side is vague. There is a huge potential for PdM in SMEs to design cost models and focus on data availability impediments. Management and monitoring of PdM and skilled personnel are also inadequate. Thus, we present a study that extracts the knowledge from the existing literature about PdM in SMEs, finds the research gap, and can assist in identifying the barriers and challenges of PdM adoption in SMEs.