Maintenance Performance in the Age of Industry 4.0: A Bibliometric Performance Analysis and a Systematic Literature Review

Featured Application This article is focused on a literature review to provide a valuable resource for understanding the latest developments in the Maintenance 4.0 approach. The conducted research will be helpful for many people, including maintenance managers, maintenance engineers, and researchers, who are interested in the issues of maintenance performance in the context of Industry 4.0 technologies implementation. The conducted literature review intends to introduce the readers to the major up-to-date theory and practice in Maintenance 4.0 main research directions. The presented study makes it possible to identify the thematic structure related to maintenance performance. In addition, it shows which topics from the studied scientific area are the most investigated in a given country/region. At the same time, the conducted analysis allowed the development of future research directions in the areas identified as research and knowledge gaps. Recently, there has been a growing interest in issues related to maintenance performance management, which is confirmed by a significant number of publications and reports devoted to these problems. However, theoretical and application studies indicate a lack of research on the systematic literature reviews and surveys of studies that would focus on the evolution of Industry 4.0 technologies used in the maintenance area in a cross-sectional manner. Therefore, the paper reviews the existing literature to present an up-to-date and content-relevant analysis in this field. The proposed methodology includes bibliometric performance analysis and a review of the systematic literature. First, the general bibliometric analysis was conducted based on the literature in Scopus and Web of Science databases. Later, the systematic search was performed using the Primo multi-search tool following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The main inclusion criteria included the publication dates (studies published from 2012-2022), studies published in English, and studies found in the selected databases. In addition, the authors focused on research work within the scope of the Maintenance 4.0 study. Therefore, papers within the following research fields were selected: (a) augmented reality, (b) virtual reality, (c) system architecture, (d) data-driven decision, (e) Operator 4.0, and (f) cybersecurity. This resulted in the selection of the 214 most relevant papers in the investigated area. Finally, the selected articles in this review were categorized into five groups: (1) Data-driven decision-making in Maintenance 4.0, (2) Operator 4.0, (3) Virtual and Augmented reality in maintenance, (4) Maintenance system architecture, and (5) Cybersecurity in maintenance. The obtained results have led the authors to specify the main research problems and trends related to the analyzed area and to identify the main research gaps for future investigation from academic and engineering perspectives.