Maintenance involves a large amount of data management. Although many tools, strategies, and systems, have been developed to organize the maintenance information resources, SMEs have not found the same benefits as large companies due to their inherent characteristics and, above all, the maturity level of the maintenance department. Maturity models are useful tools for assessing the maturity of maintenance information practices; however, existing models are not suitable for any type of business context, as they required companies to have a clear organizational structure and definite informative infrastructure. Moreover, they do not assist in identifying and defining actions to reach the highest level. This paper proposes a model for assessing and improving maintenance management information practices. It allows a clear measure of the maturity of the maintenance information management practices in industrial contexts and provides improvement actions identifying the information and data needed to enhance maintenance management information practices.

In this paper we propose a new sliceable bandwidth variable transponder (SBVT) architecture with the separate analysis on the transmitter and receiver section. In transmission section we propose a distance module (DM) which is a programmable module. It divides a data stream/main stream (which employs a super-channel) into sub-stream and assigned modulation technique to each sub-stream based on their light path distance detailing the concept of sub-channel. In this paper, we have also proposed an algorithm for the distance module. Next we propose a modulation and transmission module (M&TM), where, planar light wave circuit (PLC) is used for enabling three modulation techniques (PM-16QAM, PM-QPSK and PM-BPSK). Finally, we propose the receiving section, which is designed to support three modulation techniques. It consists of two demodulator circuits, one for PM-16QAM/PM-QPSK and the other for PM-BPSK. In this proposed work, we focus on the multi-mode interference (MMI) devices (MMI coupler and MMI splitter) because of their photonic integration technology which is necessary for the implementation of SBVT. Lastly, we propose an elastic optical node architecture which removes the limitations of previously discussed node architecture for long distance communication.