Maintenance:: Changing role in life cycle management

As attention to environmental problems grows, product life cycle management is becoming a crucial issue in realizing a sustainable society. Our objective is to provide the functions necessary for such a society while minimizing material and energy consumption. From this viewpoint, we should redefine the role of maintenance as a prime method for life cycle management. In this paper, we first discuss the changing role of maintenance from the perspective of life cycle management. Then, we present a maintenance framework that shows management cycles of maintenance activities during the product life cycle. According to this framework, we identify technical issues of maintenance and discuss the advances of technologies supporting the change in the role of maintenance.