Opportune maintenance and predictive maintenance decision support

Conventional maintenance strategies on a single component are being phased out in favour of more predictive maintenance actions. These new kinds of actions are performed in order to control the global performances of the whole industrial system. They are anticipative in nature, which allows a maintenance expert to consider non-already-planned maintenance actions. Two questions naturally emerge: when to perform a predictive maintenance action; how a maintenance expert can take advantage of a given predictive maintenance action that will have to be performed. These questions concern maintenance decision making and lead to the notion of opportune maintenance actions. This new concept extends the investigation of predictive maintenance actions from one single component to several ones.