This part of IEC 60300 provides guidelines for the development of failure management policies for equipment and structures using reliability centred maintenance (RCM) analysis techniques.

This part serves as an application guide and is an extension of IEC 60300-3-10, IEC 60300-3- 12 and IEC 60300-3-14. Maintenance activities recommended in all three standards, which relate to preventive maintenance, may be implemented using this standard.

The RCM method can be applied to items such as ground vehicles, ships, power plants, aircraft, and other systems which are made up of equipment and structure, e.g. a building, airframe or ship's hull. Typically, equipment comprises a number of electrical, mechanical, instrumentation or control systems and subsystems which can be further broken down into progressively smaller groupings, as required.

This standard is restricted to the application of RCM techniques and does not include aspects of maintenance support, which are covered by the above-mentioned standards or other dependability and safety standards.