Benefits of cyber-physical systems for maintenance in the industry 4.0

The need to survive in a competitive market forces companies to serve their customers with higher agility at even lower prices. Industry 4.0 technologies enable faster responses and lower costs in various operational processes, including the maintenance area. Maintenance has a significant impact on companies’ operational costs, and a program that contributes to the reduction of these costs is the Condition Based Maintenance (CBM). The advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is leading CBM towards the so-called E-maintenance, defined as a communication network, with asset information management, which integrates and synchronizes the various maintenance and reliability applications. E-maintenance brings the promise of collecting and delivering asset information where and when it is needed. Its implementation depends on the development of specific skills that can emerge from research in the technological areas of Industry 4.0, such as the Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Wireless Sensor Networks, among others. The Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), a fundamental basis for the existence of Industry 4.0, meet the unique characteristics of E-maintenance with technologies of physical awareness, planned and foresighted acting, cooperation and negotiation, human-machine interaction, learning, evolution and basic infrastructure. The objective of this work is to identify the benefits of deploying CPS technologies to E-maintenance. For this, a systematic literature review was conducted, identifying the CPS properties and technologies, Emaintenance characteristics and requirements, and the benefits of their integration in an Industry 4.0 environment. The research presents that CPS technologies are already available for application and, also, satisfy the technological challenges for E-maintenance implementation. Thus, benefits of increasing equipment availability, improving product quality, increasing maintainer and operator safety, increasing productivity and reducing maintenance costs, as well as other advantages attributed to Industry 4.0, have been identified.