References

The public standards and documents this topic draws on. Every factual claim in the preceding chapters traces to one of these; the worked example's fleet, modes, rates and intervals are illustrative teaching values and belong to no source.

Two notes before the list. Editions move: the criteria standard was revised in November 2024 and much of the material in circulation still cites the 2009 revision. And this module deliberately describes the sector standards by what they are for and where they sit rather than reproducing their internal question sets and task codes, because those are the parts that differ between revisions and the parts a practitioner must read in the current issue rather than in a summary.

The criteria standard and its guide

1. SAE JA1011, Evaluation Criteria for Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) Processes, current revision JA1011_202411, revised November 2024, superseding JA1011_200908 (August 2009) and the original JA1011_199908 (August 1999). States the minimum criteria a process must comply with to be called RCM, including the seven questions and the order in which they must be answered, the consequence classification, and the applicability and effectiveness requirements. It deliberately does not define an RCM process.
2. SAE JA1012, A Guide to the Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) Standard, current revision JA1012_201108, revised August 2011, originally issued January 2002. Amplifies and clarifies each criterion in JA1011 and covers the additional issues needed to apply RCM successfully. Its own foreword is explicit that it is not a procedural manual for performing RCM.

The 1999 issue of JA1011 names the three sources its criteria were drawn from, which is the cleanest short bibliography of the discipline: the 1978 United Airlines report, the US Navy standard and handbook lineage, and Moubray's RCM2.

The origin document

3. F. S. Nowlan and H. F. Heap, Reliability-Centered Maintenance, United Airlines, prepared for the US Department of Defense, 29 December 1978 (Defense Technical Information Center, AD-A066579). The six age-reliability patterns are Exhibit 2·13 on printed page 46, in section 2·8; the report numbers it an exhibit rather than a figure, and the per-pattern percentages appear only as labels inside the artwork, not in the running text. The narrative conclusions are on page 47. Chapter Three defines the report's four basic maintenance tasks: scheduled on-condition, scheduled rework, scheduled discard and scheduled failure-finding. Rework is the report's own term; restoration is a later renaming.
4. Timothy M. Allen, U.S. Navy Analysis of Submarine Maintenance Data and the Development of Age and Reliability Profiles, Department of the Navy, SUBMEPP, Portsmouth NH, 2001. The primary source for the replication percentages, and for the warning that the studies are not like-for-like: fifty-two submarine component types, profiled at equipment level with all failure modes aggregated.
5. NASA, Reliability-Centered Maintenance Guide for Facilities and Collateral Equipment, September 2008. A freely available treatment of RCM applied to facilities, and the documented instance of letter drift: its Figure 4-5 reprints the six patterns under a permuted set of letters, with each percentage still attached to the correct shape.

Sector process standards

6. ATA MSG-3, Operator/Manufacturer Scheduled Maintenance Development, Airlines for America. The current fixed-wing document is Volume 1, Revision 2022.1; the publisher's revision history runs 2022.1, 2018.1, 2015.1, 2013.1, 2011.1, 2009.1, 2007.1, 2005.1, 2003.1, 2002.1, 2001.1, 1993 (Revision 2), 1988 (Revision 1) and 1980 (original issue). There is no 2021.1 and no 2023.1. Revisions are driven by Issue Papers approved by the International Maintenance Review Board Policy Board; EASA hosts the issue paper index and the individual papers, which are free to read even though MSG-3 itself is not, and that index is the way to see what a given revision changed.
7. MIL-STD-3034A, Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) Process, US Department of Defense (the RCM process as a defence requirement, in the lineage of MIL-STD-2173(AS) and the NAVAIR and NAVSEA guidance that preceded it).
8. ASD/AIA S4000P, International specification for developing and continuously improving preventive maintenance (preventive maintenance analysis in the S-series. Its preventive maintenance task requirements are handed to maintenance task analysis through S3000L, which states the boundary explicitly).
9. IEC 60300-3-11, Dependability management, Part 3-11: Application guide, Reliability centred maintenance (the international application guide, and the usual citation for a generic industrial RCM process).

What this list does not assert. MSG-3's internal content, its failure effect category wording, its task abbreviations and its structural and zonal analysis terminology are behind a paywall and are not reproduced here; the same applies to the current revision status and internal process of MIL-STD-3034A and to the current edition of IEC 60300-3-11. Entries 7 and 9 are cited by title and role only, and a programme relying on either should confirm the current issue directly with the publisher.

Related material in this knowledgebase

10. MIL-STD-1629A, Procedures for Performing a Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (the mode list every RCM analysis starts from; see the FMECA module).

For what a selected task then costs in hours, people and parts, see the maintenance task analysis module; for where the resulting work is performed, the level of repair analysis module; for the modes and rates this analysis consumes, the FMECA references.