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Developments due to robotization ensure that employees can reach more difficult places more easily by carrying out digital inspections in advance. Virtual Reality/Augment Reality makes it easier for employees to watch from a distance, which improves work safety. In addition, there is also increasing social pressure, which means that legislation and regulations are being tightened up.

This includes preventing the release of harmful substances and other safety protocols. Preventing disruptive effects caused by, for example, legislation and regulations, can ensure that companies give an even more central position to a safe working environment.

Everything automatically controlled by data

In addition to the fact that assets are becoming increasingly complex, more and more information is being released in the form of data. The amount of available data is increasing almost exponentially, giving companies more and more insights into important maintenance processes that could not be obtained before. The rise of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things will ensure that the role of data continues to grow and will even make it possible to make predictions about the future without a person intervening. Moreover, the combination of the use of robots and artificial intelligence ensures that more and more tasks in Management and Maintenance will be automated. This will ensure that the tasks of employees in Management and Maintenance will change and that different knowledge will be needed to perform this task

Increasing automation level

David Lopez, Siteplant (Spain)is one of the EuroMaintenance workshopleaders; "Companies aredrastically increasing their automation level, both in routinary tasksand in non routinary tasks. In this scenario, robotics seeks for newfields of application, not necessarily related with productive tasks.Moreover, reliability will be the key transversal function to be empowered within these 'automated’ organizations and Artificial Intelligence will provide (in fact, it is providing…) robots with new analyticsand decision-making capabilities that boost their autonomy”.

The Workshop

Robotics has been widely used in the manufacturing processes, but in other activities such as maintenance their use is barely limited to simple inspections, according to Lopez. "New fields of robotics applications can be developed to increasethe operational reliability of assets. In our workshop, we will expose the several potential applications of robotics to maintenanceactivities and, in general, to increase assets reliability, along thewhole reliability value chain (design, construction, start-up, operations, maintenance and dismantling). Also, the current state of the artof autonomous robots will be discussed under a pragmatic point ofview, and specific use cases will be explained, such as inspectionsrounds performed by robots or their polyvalence and fl exibility to alternate supervisión, safety and inspection tasks within a manufacturing enviroment”.