# Reliability and Risk Centered Maintenance: A Novel Method for Supporting Maintenance Management
## 1 Introduction  
Proper maintenance management is crucial to ensure competitiveness and profitability in all industry sectors [1]. With the increase in the complexity and size of the physical asset portfolio covered by maintenance management, there is pressure for better maintenance performance as it was recognized as strategic for physical asset management [2]. In other words, the continuous pursuit of productivity and less waste as a competitive factor brought greater importance to maintenance management in organizations [3]. Maintenance progress over time is typically represented across generations [4; 5; 6]. Each generation is influenced by the economic and technological contexts of its period which influenced the development of different strategies and methods to support maintenance management. With the rise of physical asset management, formalized mainly with the introduction of the international ISO 55000 series for asset management in 2014, a new milestone was established for maintenance whose management is a strategic process in organizations in a sustainable perspective [7; 8]. Maintenance management is confronted with increasing availability, ensuring quality requirements, and controlling the safety and environmental risks associated with physical assets. Thus, the development of appropriate failure management policies is essential but also a challenge for maintenance planning [9]. As failure management is a coordinated activity of an organization that deals with the recognition, prevention, and reaction to failures [10], maintenance management shall be supported with strategies and methods to properly define its policies. The Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) method was developed within civil aviation as a logical discipline for the development of scheduled maintenance programs to ensure the reliability capabilities of the physical asset at a minimum cost [11]. Hence, it defines the maintenance plans economically to restore and preserve the operational ability of equipment [12]. For that, the item under review is individually analyzed to identify all its functions, functional failures, potential failure modes, failure effects, and failure consequences, and select the maintenance tasks [6]. Since its first publication in the late 1970s, RCM has been applied in almost every industry sector and industrialized country [13]. With the increasing awareness of environmental impacts and ensuring the health and safety of personnel in industrial processes driven by the occurrence of major accidents in the mid-80s, a Risk-Based Maintenance (RBM) strategy has emerged. According to [PERSON] and [PERSON] [14], this strategy aims at reducing the overall risk of failure of operational facilities by assigning focused maintenance efforts in high and medium-risk areas while the efforts are minimized in low-risk areas, reducing the overall scope and cost of the maintenance plan. Therefore, the RBM method is designed to study all failure modes, determine the associated risks, and develop a maintenance plan that minimizes the occurrence of high-risk failure modes [4]. Although RCM and RBM can be complementary, these methods are not generally addressed together in the literature. A search conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection in August 2023 showed only 23 documents associating the terms \"RCM\" or \"Reliability-Centered Maintenance\" with \"RBM\" or \"Risk-Based Maintenance\" in their titles, abstracts, or keywords. However, none of these documents integrate or combine the methods, instead, they approach or discuss them separately [15; 16; 17; 18]. Faced with a current scenario in which equipment and processes are increasingly complex and the concern for the safety of workers and the environment is higher, reliability and risk should guide maintenance planning together. As derived from different maintenance strategies, RCM and RBM methods provide different focus and features to conduct maintenance planning.