5. Conclusion

The SCRM method defined by EPRI for power plant maintenance largely respects the fundamental principles of the original RCM reliability-based maintenance method defined in 1978 by Nowlan and Heap. To reduce development time and associated resources, SRCM groups the original RCM procedure into five steps: identification of important functions, analysis of critical components, analysis of non-critical components, comparison of maintenance tasks and their implementation. SRCM makes extensive use of feedback and expert advice from specialists in equipment design, operation and maintenance. A fundamental feature of SRCM is the use of generic frameworks developed for different types of component. They contain conditional maintenance tasks, scheduled maintenance tasks and monitoring tasks, as well as their completion periods according to criticality criteria. The proposed criteria relate to the...