Guest editorial

Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering

ISSN: 1355-2511

Article publication date: 5 August 2014

153

Citation

Parida, P.A. and Kumar, D.R.K.a.D.U. (2014), "Guest editorial", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JQME-06-2014-0033

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Volume 20, Issue 3

Application of information and communication technology (ICT) within the area of condition monitoring (CM), maintenance engineering and management is increasing manifold during the twenty-first century with the emergence of e-Maintenance. e-Maintenance, enabled by hardware and software with embedded sensors and wireless networks, is applied to plants and machinery throughout their entire life cycle. Presently, e-Maintenance is exploited in the industrial domains of transport, energy, manufacturing and process industries. The aim of e-Maintenance is to align the maintenance process with the business and operational processes for achieving organizational goals.

The role of CM and ICTs as an important area of research is facilitating an effective management of the operation and maintenance process. Therefore, more and more researchers are undertaking R&D activities in these two multi-disciplinary areas in search of innovative solutions to the challenges encountered by the industries. The theme of this special issue on e-Maintenance is appropriately relevant for the health management system of the industries under present scenario.

These papers are selected from the second International Workshop and Congress organized during December 2012 at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. There are six papers included in this special issue covering the multi-disciplinary areas of CM and e-Maintenance.

The first paper, by M. Asplund et al., investigate the failure-driven capacity consumption of wheels on the track, to determine the relationship to vehicle wheel configurations which show a larger amount of failures. Further, it also ascertains the influence of the temperature and the travelling direction of the train on the number of events. This information can be used to develop prognostic health management (PHM) to gain enhanced track capacity.

The second paper by J. Campos presents the current and prospective state of affairs for the ICTs in CM and Maintenance, especially for the e-Maintenance approach.

Information logistics provides methodologies and technologies to support continuous dependability improvement through monitoring of the operational availability performance and its aspects of reliability performance, maintainability performance and maintenance support performance. P. Söderholm and P. Norrbin describe an information logistic framework for continuous dependability improvement in the third paper.

The fourth paper by R. Kour et al. shows how research within the railway sector is working for developing e-maintenance solutions using the e-cloud and web-based applications for improved CM, better maintenance and increased uptime for railway maintenance decision making.

The paper by C. Stenström and A. Parida investigates dependability of linear assets analysis and display, considering both the asset and the user context, to simplify cognitive tasks of planning and decision-making. A methodology is developed and discussed to link together the technical and organizational levels and to measure asset performance considering their spatial extension.

The sixth paper by P. Tretten and R. Karim discusses the maintenance decisions need to have a system perspective, i.e. the whole process, including order information, production information and financial information.

The guest editors would like to thank all authors who have contributed their papers to this special issue, and all reviewers for their untiring efforts in getting the papers reviewed in time.

Professor Aditya Parida, Dr Ramin Karim and Dr Uday Kumar
Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden

About the Guest Editors

Aditya Parida is an Associate Professor in the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering of the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Professor Aditya Parida is the corresponding editor and can be contacted at: mailto:Aditya.Parida@ltu.se

Dr Ramin Karim is an Associate Professor in the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering of the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.

Dr Uday Kumar is the Chair Professor in the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering of the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.

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