The maintenance of the social infrastructure is not a new concept. The maintenance becomes highlight as resource conservation and environmental protection are important issues. As maintaining the products or machines is additional human work, so it is considered a necessary evil. But for increasing the reliability of the artifacts, the maintenance becomes a very important activity.
The maintenance is one of the reconsideration on traditional technology trends. Mass production/ mass consumption made activate the economy, but it produced much waste. The maintenance will contribute to reduce the human impact to the environment. So it is one part of “inverse manufacturing”.
The maintenance do not always have good effect. In some case throwaway system is better than maintain. Especially the case that merit of scale is strong, and that technological innovation happens. The type of maintenance is different as speedy maintenance after failure or prevention failure.
Towards the aged society, the automatic maintenance technology is being developed. The maintenance contains as follows; prevent the failure, find the failure, make temporary repairs, make regular repairs, design without failure using analysis the failure pattern, recycle parts (or products).
The “Maintenance Engineering Laboratory” was established in the University of Tokyo. The systematize the maintenance technologies which various companies have is one of the way to spread the maintenance activity.
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