1

According to the classical view, the role of maintenance is to fix broken items. Taking such a narrow perspective, maintenance activities will be confined to the reactive tasks of repair actions or item replacement triggered by failures. Thus, this approach is known as reactive maintenance, breakdown maintenance, or corrective maintenance. A more recent view of maintenance is defined by Geraerds (1985) as “all activities aimed at keeping an item in, or restoring it to, the physical state considered necessary for the fulfilment of its production function.” Obviously, the scope of this enlarged view also includes the proactive tasks, such as routine servicing and periodic inspection, preventive replacement, and condition monitoring. Depending on the deployment of responsibilities within the organization, these maintenance tasks may be shared by several departments. For instance, in an organization practicing total productive maintenance (TPM) (Nakajima, 1988), the routine servicing and periodic inspection of equipment are handled by the operating personnel, whereas overhauls and major repairs are done by the maintenance department. TPM will be discussed in more detail in Section 1.4.