Maintenance Forum 2019: Fit for Smart Maintenance

The 18th Maintenance Forum of the Chair of Enterprise Logistics and the Fraunhofer IML took place in Dortmund from May 22 to 23, 2019. 115 participants accepted Prof. Michael Henke's invitation to examine the future of maintenance from a wide variety of perspectives in exciting presentations. The thematic focus "Fit for Smart Maintenance" proved to be a topic close to the pulse of the times: Smart Maintenance is no longer an idea for the future, but a key driver for the digital transformation of many companies. This consensus was confirmed in 14 lecture sessions with a total of 39 speakers. High-ranking industry representatives presented applications and examples from areas such as innovative services, blockchain, predictive analytics and additive manufacturing in the context of maintenance. The contributions from the scientists in attendance ideally complemented these and other topics. A particular highlight was the presentation of the initial results of the joint project "Smart Maintenance - the path from the status quo to the target vision" led by Prof. Henke. The project, which is funded by the Academy of Science and Engineering, provides information on the current level of maturity of previous efforts to establish intelligent maintenance in practice and outlines the future vision of smart maintenance in practice. In an online survey accompanying the event, visitors to InFo 2019 confirmed the results presented. Further highlights were the keynote speeches by Prof. ten Hompel, Managing Director of the Fraunhofer IML and Prof. Morik, Head of the Chair of Artificial Intelligence at TU Dortmund University. They made it impressively clear what an important role maintenance will play in a bio-intelligent future of value creation characterized by artificial intelligence.

The implementation-oriented and practical contributions of the InFo 2019 were published in a conference volume, which is publicly available for download The link to the conference volume as well as some impressions can be found on the project homepage: www.info2019.de

Special thanks go to the speakers, authors and numerous helpers from the Chair of Enterprise Logistics and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics.