ABSTRACT
Current advances in ICT are shaping the way we live and work. Current communication solutions allow people to be “always online, always connected”, and similar technologies are applied to machine communication, also known as M2M communication. In particular, research and development efforts are devoted to extending the IoT to maintenance, thus providing ubiquitous access through the Internet to industrial systems under maintenance. This introductory chapter draws a picture of the current trends in maintenance, and then summarizes the content of the rest of the book by providing hints to what PM can be and can do for the industry. The main objective of MANTIS is set to “develop a Cyber Physical System based Proactive Maintenance Service Platform Architecture enabling Collaborative Maintenance Ecosystems”. The PM service platform consists of distributed processing chains that efficiently transform raw data into knowledge while minimising the need for transfer bandwidth.
