Maintenance and Safety and Aging Infrastructure

Infrastructure refers to the fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function.

It typically characterises technical structures such as roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, and so forth, and can be defined as “the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions.

Maintenance Engineering is the discipline and profession of applying engineering concepts to the optimization of equipment, procedures, and departmental budgets to achieve better maintainability, reliability, and availability of equipment. Maintenance, and hence maintenance engineering, is increasing in importance due to rising amounts of equipment, systems, machineries and infrastructure.

Since the Industrial Revolution, devices, equipment, machinery and structures have grown increasingly complex, requiring a host of personnel, vocations and related systems needed to maintain them. Prior to 2006, the United States spent approximately US$300 billion annually on plant maintenance and operations alone.

Maintenance is to ensure a unit is fit for purpose, with maximum availability at minimum costs.

A person practicing Maintenance Engineering is known as a Maintenance Engineer.