Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) was initiated by the commercial aviation industry and then adopted by the U.S. military in the 1970s and then by the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry (in the 1980s) followed by other commercial industries and fields in the early 1990s.

RCM is defined by the technical standard SAE JA1011, as ‘‘an engineering framework that enables the definition of a complete maintenance regime. It regards maintenance as the means to maintain the functions a user may require of machinery in a defined operating context’’.