text: what is a good source on reliability centered maintenance to do a reserch report on? - how is it defined? - what are its elements? - how is it specified? - how is it measured? - what are the major benefits? - applications? there is a book called "reliability centered maintenance ii" by john mowbray that would be an excellent source.    to try to answer all of your questions here would take too long.  suffice to say that rcm is an approach that was developed from the airline industry.  the us defense dept. asked two guys named nolan and heap to see how the airline industry did its aircraft maintenance.  the key findings were this:  scheduled maintenance such as overhauls have little effect on the reliability of a complex system unless it has a dominant failure mode.  there are many items for which there is no effective form of scheduled maintenance.  the link below might be a good start.