Conclusion
Introduction to maintenance methods

This article is an introduction to the maintenance methods dealt with in detail in the following articles, and presents the different concepts of maintenance methods that all maintenance managers must implement as part of a maintenance policy that forms an integral part of a company's overall production system policy. Based on the work of the European Commission for Standardization, the various concepts have been redefined in the knowledge that the failure event has a probabilistic dimension in all cases, which is sometimes difficult to get across to managers who usually think in terms of certainties. With the exception of a few easily identifiable special cases, this article shows that preventive maintenance, whatever its form, is not always a panacea, and that in practice, the maintenance policy, taking into account the various parameters recalled in this article, must be a harmonious...