Representations of the maintenance function
A functional approach to maintenance

For the non-specialist, maintenance means first and foremost repairing an asset that has broken down, i.e. corrective maintenance, which is in a way the first perception of this function.

The next thing to think about is that by repairing the system before it breaks down, you can save yourself a lot of downtime. All you have to do is periodically replace potentially defective parts before they become defective: this is systematic preventive maintenance.

Moving further away from failure, and the toolbox that is often the first image conjured up by the word "maintenance", we can focus on the mechanisms of degradation and the means of observing them. The aim is then to restore the asset...