Reliability-Centered Maintenance: From Functional Failures to Defensible Maintenance Tasks

Abstract

Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) is often reduced to a preventive-maintenance optimization exercise. That description misses its central purpose: determining what must be done to preserve the functions of physical assets in their operating context. A pump in continuous duty, a standby emergency generator, and an isolation valve can have similar components but fundamentally different functional requirements and failure consequences. Their maintenance programs should therefore not be identical.