The role and function of maintenance is today subject to a profound transformation. Compared to past developments, it now attains a broader scope. Maintenance decisions are no longer addressing a narrow scope limited to technical and operational considerations. Instead, they are increasingly related to a comprehensive systems engineering approach, linked to extended enterprise and risk management considerations and adopting new technology, management and business perspectives. Hence, maintenance entails different processes and multi-disciplinary approaches, requiring the integration of a wide range of engineering and management-related methodologies, information and communication technologies, management philosophies, models and strategies, as well as considerations on business strategies and models. It is a value adding function for a range of industrial assets and products and is increasingly linked to complex product-service propositions, thus requiring increasing connectivity of involved entities, ranging from low level component and asset interactions, to higher level multi-stakeholder performance and service delivery considerations. This special issue provides evidence of the evolving transformation of the maintenance function, the breadth of activities contributing to it and the increasing impact that emerging information and communication technologies have on enabling such advancements. It comprises 11 contributions, which are revised and extended manuscripts, following the third International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) workshop on Advanced Maintenance Engineering Services and Technology (IFAC A-MEST’16) which took place in Biarritz, France, 19–21 October 2016. The contributions included in this issue are a clear reflection of the fact that the research agenda in maintenance engineering and management is currently integrating new topics and transforming traditional ones in view of the new challenges and needs for multi-disciplinary approaches.The first two papers deal with different perspectives of risk management in maintenance services and production management.