An E-maintenance platform based on SOA and smart sensors

New emerging ICT solutions are providing powerful capabilities for distributed control and monitoring of production plants and machineries. In particular, Smart Sensors and Embedded mechatronics systems are promising intelligence at shop floor level, allowing many decisions taken in real time by decentralizing data analysis. Moreover, such new devices can be exploited by the use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), that can allow their interconnection in a kind of flat architecture. Maintenance activities can especially benefit from these technological developments, leading to distributed monitoring activities, faster data analysis, also guaranteeing low cost solution development. The paper presents the potential of a combined use of modularization and standardization to better exploit technology-enhanced solutions for improving maintenance management.