Emergency Software Maintenance for Individual Industrial Equipments

Embedded software maintenance is increasingly recognized to be one of the most serious limitations of industrial equipments, especially under emergency conditions. The paper proposes a systematic software maintenance framework, which employs three policies including the built-in, on-site, and remote maintenance, a combination of which can effectively handle the specific requirements of emergency software maintenance for individual industrial equipments. An emergency maintenance solution can significantly mitigate the catastrophic effects of equipment malfunctions caused by software errors, though it may be immature in nature and replaced by an integrated maintenance solution afterwards.