Maintenancebasedness

Maintenancebasedness is a concept describing the degree to which the performance and availability of an asset depend on ongoing maintenance actions rather than its intrinsic design. It captures how much reliable operation hinges on preventive, corrective, and predictive maintenance activities to sustain required functionality over the asset’s life.

The term is not widely standardized and appears in asset management and systems engineering discussions as a descriptive heuristic rather than a formal metric.

Practitioners use maintenancebasedness to compare designs, maintenance strategies, and operating regimes. It informs lifecycle cost assessment, risk management, and decisions about where to invest in design robustness versus maintenance capacity.

Common indicators include the share of lifecycle cost devoted to maintenance, maintenance-related downtime, and reliability measures such as MTBF and MTTR, as well as the ratio of preventive to corrective maintenance.

Examples include heavy industrial machinery that relies on scheduled servicing to maintain safety margins, software systems dependent on regular patches, and public transit networks where service level depends on maintenance throughput.

Critiques note that high maintenancebasedness can mask design flaws, complicate budgeting, and obscure the root causes of failures. Measuring it precisely is challenging, and the concept is sensitive to data quality and organizational context.

Related topics include maintenance, reliability engineering, design for maintainability, and lifecycle asset management.