TABLE OF CONTENTS Equipment failure is never desirable. As was discussed in Chap. 4, equipment reliability is a major goal of any development program, but is it impossible to produce a design that does not eventually break? Since most systems are in fact an amalgamation of many related subsystems which must all work together to allow the system to achieve its operational requirements, it is necessary for each subsystem to also achieve as high a level of reliability as possible. When a system is inoperative, it cannot perform its mission. Depending on the system s missions, a system failure during its mission cannot only be undesirable, it can be hazardous or even catastrophic.
This brings us to the purpose of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). The purpose of RCM is to identify maintenance which can be done on a scheduled basis to avoid unwanted and untimely failures and improve overall system reliability and, therefore, system availability. Or, in other words, fix an item within a system before it breaks and renders the system inoperable. RCM is applied to develop a cost-effective scheduled maintenance program.
Development of the RCM process actually began in the commercial aviation industry. Because of the catastrophic potential of failures of an aircraft during flight, several years ago the commercial aviation industry initated a series of studies to investigate the possibility of developing a methodical approach to analyzing a system design in order to identify maintenance that could be done on a scheduled basis and that, if done, would potentially...
