From remote maintenance to MAS-based e-maintenance of an industrial process

One of the main consequences of the extended enterprise is the emergence of new forms of relationships between the customer and the supplier in order to ensure the quality of service of the object throughout the life cycle. Innovative communication and co-operation methods are needed to support these new relationships. The combination of modern information processing and communication tools, commonly referred to as tele-service, offers the technical support required to access remote information. Indeed, it is easier to transfer information and knowledge to different actors than to move an actor to the site. However, even if this technical support is necessary for information communication, it is insufficient to develop a co-operation-based working situation that involves many self-motivated customers and suppliers sharing a common goal. This synergy is an emergent property of the system as a whole, and it is not expected to be obtained as a simple sum of its components. For example, a challenging problem in the field of product manufacturing is to assist the operator in its decision-making, when the system functioning is degraded, to preserve the system under service at maximum (anticipation of the failure) while remaining it in a space of allowed operation (to avoid consequences of an error in judgement). That means an evolution from tele-service to e-work and e-maintenance in particular where the assistance to operator results from collaboration of maintenance processes and experts. Consequently, this paper examines some issues and challenges involved in the evolution from the tele-maintenance of an industrial platform to the e-maintenance, and then proposes a multi-agent system-based collaboration as a solution to implement the e-maintenance experiments.