Growing competition market situations have emerged the requirement of the real-time data, understanding data behaviour, and maintenance actions in the manufacturing system. The future decision-making process in manufacturing needs to be more flexible to adapt to various methods for maintenance decision support systems (MDSS). This paper classifies various application areas of MDSS through a systemic literature review. Specifically, it identifies the relationship between the machine maintenance areas and the processes in which it integrates different tools and techniques to develop MDSS. The accumulated information helps in analyzing trends and shortcomings to concentrate the efforts for future research work. The reviewed papers are selected based on the contents, application tool assessments and clustered by their application areas. Furthermore, it proposes a structure outlined based on the functional knowledge as well as the information flow design during the development of MDSS, along with the relationship among application areas.