About Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering
Aims and scope
The Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering (JQME) publishes rigorous, practice-relevant research at the intersection of maintenance engineering, asset management, and quality performance. The journal’s mission is to advance knowledge on how organizations design, deliver, and continuously improve maintenance strategies that assure product and service quality, operational reliability, safety, and sustainability across the asset life cycle.
JQME welcomes contributions that integrate engineering, management, and data-driven methods to address contemporary maintenance challenges in manufacturing and process industries, energy and utilities, transportation, built infrastructure, logistics, healthcare, and other asset-intensive sectors. Particular emphasis is placed on research that links maintenance decisions to measurable outcomes such as variability reduction, process capability, uptime, risk exposure, cost, energy use, and environmental impact.
The journal publishes empirical studies, theory-building work, systematic reviews, methodological contributions, and industrial case studies. Papers should provide clear problem framing, robust methods, and actionable implications for both researchers and practitioners.
Topics of Interest
Maintenance strategy, reliability, and risk
- Reliability-centered maintenance and risk-based maintenance
- RAMS engineering, safety integrity, and maintenance in high-risk industries
- Maintenance policies under uncertainty, imperfect maintenance, and degradation modeling
- Criticality analysis, risk quantification, and decision support for inspection planning
Data-driven maintenance and analytics
- Condition monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics (PHM)
- Predictive and prescriptive maintenance using machine learning and statistical modeling
- Data quality, sensor validation, and uncertainty management in maintenance analytics
- Explainable and trustworthy analytics for maintenance decision-making
Digital maintenance systems and cyber-physical assets
- Industrial IoT architectures for monitoring, maintenance execution, and feedback control
- Digital twins for maintenance planning, fault diagnosis, and scenario testing
- Interoperability and standards for maintenance data exchange (e.g., asset information models)
- Cybersecurity and resilience of connected maintenance systems
Quality, variability reduction, and process performance
- Maintenance effects on process capability, stability, and product conformance
- Maintenance contributions to defect prevention, scrap reduction, and yield improvement
- Statistical process control linked with maintenance and equipment health
- Quality management systems integration with maintenance governance
Optimization, simulation, and operations research for maintenance
- Multi-objective optimization of maintenance intervals, spares, and workforce allocation
- Maintenance planning and scheduling in complex production and service systems
- Spare parts forecasting, inventory control, and supply risk for critical components
- Simulation, digital experimentation, and what-if analyses for asset-intensive operations
Asset management, life-cycle engineering, and sustainability
- Life-cycle costing, replacement decisions, and obsolescence management
- Maintenance for energy efficiency, emissions reduction, and net-zero operations
- Circular economy approaches: remanufacturing, refurbishment, and asset life extension
- Maintenance performance measurement aligned with ESG and regulatory requirements
Human factors, organization, and capability development
- Human reliability, competence management, and maintenance training approaches
- Decision-making, workload, and safety culture in maintenance environments
- Augmented support for technicians (mobile tools, remote assistance, knowledge systems)
- Organizational design, contractor management, and governance for maintenance performance
Emerging maintenance applications and cross-sector lessons
- Maintenance in renewable energy systems, smart grids, and energy storage
- Infrastructure and transportation asset maintenance (rail, aviation, ports, roads)
- Healthcare and mission-critical facility maintenance with quality and safety constraints
- Maintenance under disruption: supply constraints, extreme events, and operational shocks
