Wartungsintensiv

Wartungsintensiv is a German term used in engineering and industry to describe systems, components, or processes that require substantial maintenance effort to maintain performance, reliability, and safety. A maintenance-intensive system demands frequent inspections, adjustments, replacements, or calibrations and exhibits a relatively high maintenance workload compared with its operation. The term is common in engineering, manufacturing, IT, and infrastructure contexts and is often used in lifecycle and cost analyses.

Causes and characteristics: maintenance intensity is driven by wear, high usage, exposure to harsh environments, complexity of subsystems, difficult access, and limited component lifespans. Such systems may experience longer downtime due to maintenance, more spare parts, specialized skills, and scheduled maintenance windows. Examples include industrial machinery with rotating parts, railway signaling, aircraft components, and critical data center infrastructure.

Management and design: To manage maintenance intensity, organizations apply maintainability engineering at the design phase, modularization, standardization, remote monitoring, diagnostics, condition-based maintenance, and predictive maintenance. Reducing maintenance intensity without compromising reliability can involve design simplifications, redundancies, and easier access.

Measurement and decision-making: Common metrics include MTBF, MTTR, total cost of ownership, maintenance cost as a share of asset value, and downtime. The concept helps compare assets or systems; highly maintenance-intensive assets may justify higher upfront robustness or automated monitoring, while others may favor simpler, easier-to-maintain designs.