Preventive maintenance (PM) has the following meanings:
The care and servicing by personnel for the purpose of maintaining equipment and facilities in satisfactory operating condition by providing for systematic inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects.
Maintenance, including tests, measurements, adjustments, and parts replacement, performed specifically to prevent faults from occurring.
Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188 and from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms In general, detection is the extraction of intelligence from a carrier signal in a communication system. ... Repair and Maintenance is fixing any sort of mechanical or electrical device should it get out of order or broken (repair) as well as performing the routine actions which keep the device in working order (maintenance) or prevent trouble from arising (preventive maintenance). ... Federal Standard 1037C entitled Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms is a U.S. Federal Standard, issued by the General Services Administration pursuant to the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, as amended. ... MIL-STD-188 is a series of U.S. military standards relating to telecommunications. ... The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms is a compedium of terminology used by the United States Department of Defense (DOD). ...
While preventive maintenance is generally considered to be worthwhile, it is important to note that there are risks such as equipment failure or human error involved when performing PM, just as in any maintenance operation. PM is also sometimes augmented by reliability centered maintenance, which attempts to determine the best PM tasks, and by predictive maintenance, which models past behavior to predict failures. The word error has different meanings in different domains. ... Predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to predict when maintenance should be performed. ... An abstract model (or conceptual model) is a theoretical construct that represents physical, biological or social processes, with a set of variables and a set of logical and quantitative relationships between them. ...
The phrase 'preventive maintenance' (and its sibling 'preventative maintenance') is used to differentiate from maintenance that is performed to fix a problem after it has occurred.
In Popular Culture
Maintenance workers in Doom 3 are slaughtered in mass like the pig-dogs they are. Hell there's even zombies of maintenance workers with guts and organs hanging out! Blow those fuckers away.