Maintenance 5.0 inaugurates an era in which understanding prevails over control. All events become strategic levers and sources of systemic intelligence serving long term resilience. This is where an industry capable of learning from reality, adapting to it and strengthening its operational sovereignty is being reshaped. .
Maintenance 5.0 is now emerging as a technical worldview that seeks less to control than to understand. The industrial era of total control, inherited from the Industry 4.0 paradigm, has exhausted its promises of efficiency and predictability. It has built data architectures so massive that they have ultimately confined human decision making within a logic of technological dependency, detached from field realities and extremely difficult to govern. The ambition to anticipate everything has turned against itself. Over recent years, the most automated companies have often been the least adaptable in the face of crises. This observation, documented by the work of the OCDE and by researchers such as Bokrantz, reveals the fragility of a model based on total mastery. Recent industrial history bears witness to this systemic vulnerability born from the obsession with zero failure and perfect yield. Reality, increasingly complex, has reminded us that attempting to contain it is futile. It is within this context that Maintenance 5.0 presents itself as a strategic and political rupture. It no longer seeks to eliminate uncertainty but to build, with uncertainty, the conditions for sustainable continuity. What predictive maintenance once considered an error to be avoided becomes an experience of knowledge. Failure is no longer the enemy of the system but becomes its memory and a source of intelligence. Organizations learn to ask themselves not only what they did but also why they did it. The purpose of maintenance is therefore no longer limited to performance but also includes discernment applied to the continuity of the productive system.
Maintenance 5.0 makes it possible to build a strategic memory, a source of situated intelligence, to reinvent sustainable industrial continuity.
This transformation aligns with a broader movement, that of Industry 5.0 supported by the European Commission. This vision goes beyond the optimization logic inherited from Industry 4.0 to place sustainability and resilience at the heart of industrial strategy. The European Union affirms the need to rethink value chains, diversify supply sources, and anchor economic models in material sobriety. Industry must become less dependent on resource flows, more adaptive to uncertainty, and capable of ensuring the continuity of its vital functions in an unstable environment. Maintenance 5.0 plays a decisive role within this architecture by ensuring operational stability and control over infrastructure life cycles. Sustainability therefore becomes the condition for resilience. As demonstrated by the World Bank report Lifelines The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity, every dollar invested in intelligent maintenance and infrastructure resilience generates four dollars in economic value. In South Asian countries, drinking water disruptions caused by insufficient maintenance have cost up to 2% of GDP. To address this challenge, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the implementation of an intelligent maintenance program for pumps and treatment plants made it possible to reduce service losses from 36% to 18% while ensuring continuity of distribution for more than ninety five percent of the network. Japan reduced railway maintenance costs by 30% by integrating embedded sensors and digital twins, extending equipment lifespan by an additional twenty years. In Germany, the Energiewende program optimized the maintenance of power grids to extend the lifespan of solar and wind installations, reducing repair costs by nearly 25%.
Maintenance 5.0 leverages Industry 4.0 technologies as instruments of sobriety capable of optimizing performance while reducing systemic footprint.
Resilience, therefore, becomes the second essential component of sustainable maintenance. The study Industry 5.0 A Transformative Vision for Europe highlights the need to strengthen the robustness of supply chains. Certain European companies have implemented strategies of controlled redundancy and partial relocation. The group STMicroelectronics, for example, distributed its critical activities across several production and maintenance sites in Europe, ensuring operational continuity during the COVID-19 crisis. These diversification strategies resulted in a 45% reduction in production losses linked to supply disruptions. Similarly, the Swedish steel industry introduced maintenance programs based on real time failure monitoring, reducing unplanned downtime by thirty five percent and lowering accidental CO₂ emissions by 18%. The World Bank report cited above also provides major economic insight into the measurable benefits of resilient maintenance. In Mozambique, integrating maintenance into the design of road networks reduced post cyclone economic losses by 60%. Investment in well maintained and shock resistant infrastructure proved four times more profitable than post disaster reconstruction. In Kenya, the creation of a regional road maintenance authority reduced intervention delays from 6 months to 2 weeks, increasing network availability by 40% and lowering repair costs by 35%. These examples illustrate the value of an integrated approach combining maintenance, territorial planning, and resilience.
Resilience thus turns maintenance into a lever of strategic performance capable of converting every shock into a measurable and sustainable economic advantage.
This orientation requires a new form of governance, referred to by the European report as Governance 5.0. It establishes a decision making framework based on cooperation, coherence of public policies, and shared management of sustainability. Governance 5.0 articulates the roles of the state, industry, and territories to plan and prioritize maintenance interventions based on their criticality. It introduces resilience and sustainability indicators to measure real progress in technical and institutional systems. The European Union therefore proposes the creation of an industrial sustainability indicator integrating the performance of maintenance programs on critical infrastructure. In France and the Netherlands, integrated governance models bringing together companies, local authorities, and the state have made it possible to prioritize interventions according to systemic risk, optimizing maintenance budgets and reducing public costs by an average of 20%. These policies embody a vision of maintenance as a structuring collective investment, guaranteeing economic sovereignty and industrial security. Industry 5.0, according to the European Commission, must therefore be self sustaining and less fragile. It must learn to cope with exogenous shocks, anticipate failures, and guarantee the continuity of its vital functions. The principles of diversification, controlled redundancy, and intelligent maintenance become the pillars of this stability. Maintenance becomes the core of industrial resilience. To support this momentum, the European community launched CoP 5.0. Thus emerges the true manifesto of a sustainable industry that accepts the complexity of the world in order to anchor its own balances and endure.
Governance 5.0 elevates maintenance as a structuring lever to guarantee sovereignty, stability and sustainability in the face of real world complexity.
Technologies inherited from Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, digital twins, and data ecosystems, remain essential, but their role is evolving. The work of Bukowski shows that AI makes it possible to optimize maintenance resources by combining predictive analysis with sustainability criteria. Rolls-Royce has implemented a Zero Waste Maintenance strategy based on the responsible use of engine data. Spare parts consumption decreased by 25% and logistics transport by 40%. Self learning algorithms are trained locally, limiting the energy expenditure associated with large scale computation. Maintenance thus becomes a lever of digital sobriety. Digital twins model interactions between technical assets, energy flows, and material flows. Several European research initiatives, such as DigiPrime and the work of Psarommatis show that these tools make it possible to anticipate the overall impact of a maintenance intervention by integrating logistics, energy consumption, and resource availability. Case studies report consumption reductions between 10 and 15% achieved through route optimization, joint planning of interventions, and pooling of technical resources.
Maintenance 5.0 leverages Industry 4.0 technologies as instruments of sobriety capable of optimising performance while reducing systemic footprint.
Finally, centralization, a source of dependency and vulnerability, gives way to federated, interoperable, and secure architectures, referred to as Governance 5.0. The European project Catena X is one of the first interoperable data ecosystems developed by automotive manufacturers and industrial players to guarantee traceability and secure sharing of maintenance and life cycle information. This approach has delivered measurable improvements in intervention planning, with productivity gains estimated at 20% and a 10% nt reduction in maintenance costs enabled by real time data exchange between partners.
Mustapha Derras
