Asset, Risk and Maintenance Management

Abstract

Firstly, this chapter starts in Sect. 2.2 by looking at asset management in the context of a business environment for asset intensive industries. As will be seen, asset management is an umbrella concept that may have different meanings to different practitioners depending on their context and viewpoint. A short history and the development of specifications and standards of asset management are then provided. Section 2.3 continues with considering risk management as a decision-making method within asset management. In fact, risk management is seen as a business-related managerial method for making complex asset-related information understandable, comparable and manageable when interpreted as a measure of risk. Sections 2.4 and 2.5 cover the core topic of this book, namely maintenance management. An overview of literature on maintenance tasks, policies and concepts is provided in Sect. 2.4. Section 2.5 briefly summarises the development and evolution of maintenance management in the last decades. As maintenance management has grown to become a complex aspect within the overall business context of network companies, it is shown that knowledge of essential supporting pillars for maintenance management is required. These are discussed in Sect. 2.5. This chapter comes to a close by drawing a number of concluding remarks and explaining the way forward for the remainder of this book.