Life Cycle Maintenance

People's lives are directly and indirectly supported by a variety of facilities. The ability to perform day-to-day tasks through the functioning of various facilities from that supporting individual spaces such as homes, offices, shops, and factories to that supporting networks such those as for power, waterworks, transport, and communications. It thus goes without saying that appropriate maintenance is needed for such facilities to continue to perform the functions demanded of them. In calculating life cycle cost (LCC) of these facilities, operation and maintenance (O&M) cost greatly exceeds acquisition cost in many cases. When considering that Japan will further transform into a stocktype society that accumulates social overhead capital and cherishes quality and durability over consumption, how to effectively and efficiently conduct maintenance can be said to be a major issue for society. At the same time, the importance of maintenance is on the rise also from a standpoint of resource and environmental problems. The manufacturing paradigm used up to now involving mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal is a possible cause of problems such as global warming and resource depletion, so transforming to an environmentally sustainable manufacturing is an urgent issue. For that reason, the manufacturing industry needs to transform its role from providing goods to providing functions, achieving a system for updating functions while circulating goods. That paradigm in manufacturing is called circular manufacturing. And the innermost circulation in that is maintenance. So one has to think of ways to minimize the production of goods, meaning the need to aim to be production-free instead of maintenance-free. When thinking of maintenance as a method of dealing with a stock-type society or resource and environmental problems, the concept of facility life cycle management becomes important. In other words, maintenance must be positioned as a method of effectively exhibiting the functions of facilities though its life cycle, its efficiency increased, and its level advanced. The authors have thus proposed the concept of life cycle maintenance from that viewpoint. The following sections will give an overview of that concept, and hope that it will be of use in thinking about the role of maintenance.