Page "Safety engineering" Paragraph 4

Additionally, failure mitigation can go beyond design recommendations, particularly in the area of maintenance.

There is an entire realm of safety and reliability engineering known as Reliability Centered Maintenance ( RCM ), which is a discipline that is a direct result of analyzing potential failures within a system and determining maintenance actions that can mitigate the risk of failure.

This methodology is used extensively on aircraft and involves understanding the failure modes of the serviceable replaceable assemblies in addition to the means to detect or predict an impending failure.

Every automobile owner is familiar with this concept when they take in their car to have the oil changed or brakes checked.

Even filling up one's car with fuel is a simple example of a failure mode ( failure due to fuel exhaustion ), a means of detection ( fuel gauge ), and a maintenance action ( filling the car's fuel tank ).