Maintain Elements and Systems

The objective of the maintain elements and systems activity for a project is to perform those actions and adjustments required to return elements and systems to a satisfactory state (physical or functional) for continued operation. The activity is concerned both with planned and unplanned maintenance activities and considers requirements that may be state (failure or imminent failure), time or condition based.

A maintenance requirement is triggered by an event which may be caused by either:

• the amount of time that has elapsed since the previous maintenance operation was carried out has reached the planned interval between maintenance operations, or
• the date on which a maintenance operation is planned has arrived, or
• the current operating condition of an element, group of elements or system as determined by the values of one or more parameters has reached a level at which maintenance is set to occur, or
• an operational failure (either complete or partial) has occurred that requires a maintenance operation to correct.

In the context of the above, maintenance is also considered to encompass replacement where an element has reached the end of its working life.