Maintenance for sustainability in the Industry 4.0 context: a scoping literature review
Résumé
Industrial and manufacturing systems have a huge impact on energy and resources consumption, on the emissions to the environment and, hence, on the society. For these reasons, Sustainable Manufacturing is one of the most important issue to address for reaching a Sustainable Development of our society. In this frame, maintenance process that must ensure availability, reliability and safety of equipment, has a key role for sustainable operations. However, how maintenance can integrate the sustainability goal and contribute to this objective is not clearly defined: few studies addressing this topic are available in the current literature. These reasons have led the authors to conduct a Scoping Literature Review to investigate the role of maintenance for sustainable manufacturing, with particular focus on the 4th industrial revolution and the enabling technologies 4.0, with the aim of identifying future research directions in this field. The review was conducted following a protocol that minimizes subjectivity and allowing the critical evaluation of relevant studies. Two databases (Scopus and Web of Science) and a set of specific keywords were used to identify and select peer-reviewed papers that presented evidence on the relationship between maintenance and sustainability in the industrial field. The selected papers were assembled respect to specific thematic sections that allowed us to create research clusters in the field of interest. The analysis sheds light on the increasing interest in the last years on “maintenance & sustainability” and the big potentiality of enabling technologies 4.0 in this frame. This paper motivates future researches aimed at the development of sustainable maintenance methodologies/policies, with particular focus on industry 4.0 context, and points out research challenges and opportunities for researchers/practitioners working on maintenance field.