Enhancing smart maintenance management using fog computing technology

In order for factories to stay competitive in the current open global market, there should be efforts to put on optimizing the value stream of producing goods. Within this context, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been emerged as a technology aiming at achieving high productivity performance in manufacturing. A smart manufacturing approach also requires a smart maintenance management as it plays a crucial role in securing the productivity. IIoT applications are traditionally completed by the cloud computing technology to serve the required services. In this paper, we argue that maintenance processes have requirements that cannot be accomplished by solely the cloud computing technology. We identify several of these requirements. Then, we propose a platform using the fog computing technology, as a recently raised technology in IIoT, to enhance the smart maintenance management. We also discuss the ability of the platform in fulfilling the identified requirements.