Towards Autonomous Control in Maintenance and Spare Part Logistics – Challenges and Opportunities for Preacting Maintenance Concepts

Maintenance and spare part logistics often determine the life cycle costs related to the usage phase of assets. Therefore, different maintenance strategies are known from literature and adopted by enterprises in order to cut these costs. Most often these strategies face problems due to uncertainties in processes and tasks. This paper suggests an adjusted preactive maintenance concept which implements autonomous control aspects in order to plan and control personnel, equipment, resources, etc. ad hoc and without hierarchical planning instances. In doing so, different well known strategies will be kept equitable within the concept but are replenished with an overall heterachical organized planning and controlling approach. As a result, maintenance objects themselves gain the opportunity to trigger maintenance measures, no matter whether it's a case of inspection, maintenance or repair, according to their particular requirements. The paper gives a valuable insight into an effective concept of how to handle the complex situation for the operational maintenance processes as well as related spare part logistics in general and illustrates first concrete approaches.