  Since the time when concept of e-maintenance was introduced, most of the
works insisted on the relevance of the underlying Information and Communication
Technologies infrastructure. Through a review of current e-maintenance
conceptual approaches and realizations, this paper aims to reconsider the
predominance of ICT within e-maintenance projects and literature. The review
brings to light the importance of intelligence as a fundamental dimension of
e-maintenance that is to be led in a holistic predefined manner rather than
isolated efforts within ICT driven approaches. As a contribution towards an
intelligence based e-maintenance conceptual framework, a proposal is outlined
in this paper to model e-maintenance system as an intelligent system. The
proposed frame is based on CogAff architecture for intelligent agents. Within
the proposed frame, more importance was reserved to the environment that the
system is to be continuously aware of: Plant Environment, Internal and External
Enterprise Environment and Human Environment. In addition to the abilities
required for internal coherent behavior of the system, requirements for
maintenance activities support are also mapped within the same frame according
to corresponding levels of management. A case study was detailed in this paper
sustaining the applicability of the proposal in relation to the classification
of existing e-maintenance platforms. However, more work is needed to enhance
exhaustiveness of the frame to serve as a comparison tool of existing
e-maintenance systems. At the conceptual level, our future work is to use the
proposed frame in an e-maintenance project.
