OVERVIEW

Systems break. This is never desirable, but it does happen. As was discussed in Chapter 5, equipment reliability is a major goal of any development program, but it is impossible to produce a design that does not fail eventually. Since most systems are in fact a consolidation of many related subsystems that all must 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. A system must perform reliably in order to be available to perform its assigned missions. When a system is inoperative, it cannot perform its mission. Depending on the system's mission, a system failure during the mission not only can be undesirable, but it also can be hazardous or even catastrophic. The purpose of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is to identify maintenance that can be done on a scheduled basis to avoid unwanted and untimely failures and to improve overall system reliability and therefore system availability. In other words, its purpose is to do something to improve confidence in the reliability of a system or fix an item within a system before it breaks and renders the system inoperable.

A simple example of RCM is periodic servicing of a car. This servicing is done to avoid unwanted failures in the future. RCM is an investment of time and materials to prevent future failures that might happen during system use. There are several other names given to RCM. The...