With an increasing demand for more efficiency and less costs in industry, the integration between Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) and Spare Parts Supply Chain (SPSC) results in better availability of parts and services, avoiding breakdowns and unplanned production interruptions. Better demand planning results in better cost-effectivity as well, as parts and services can be better planned and always available when needed. The proper integration of IMS and SPSC has challenges related to semantic differences between areas with diverse concepts and vocabularies. This work intends to explore these challenges and propose a conceptual model for such integration, using existing ontologies in domains such as supply chain, maintenance and manufacturing to build on top of them an ontology aimed at allowing conceptual integration between IMS and SPSC and becoming a foundation to build future information systems to integrate these two areas. Its purpose is also further explored by using the characteristics of an ontology as tool for semantic description. Artificial intelligence, reasoning and context-aware systems are some of the areas that can benefit from the existence of an ontology to model IMS and SPSC integration. In this paper, we explore such characteristics along with integration and interoperability obtained by using an ontological model in IMS and SPSC integration.
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