Identification of critical components and their prioritization for implementation of maintenance is an important task in industry. It is also one of the essential step of reliability-centered maintenance. In this paper, an attempt made is being made to find out the key factors associated with the criticality of components. Five major criteria affecting criticality of components i.e. cost, functional dependency, complexity, maintainability, and safety impact were proposed for criticality analysis. In addition, to identify the critical components a hierarchical network is proposed based on analytic network process. The proposed methodology evaluated with a case study on CNC lathe machine. This study can provide a realistic solution to decision-making problems for maintenance planning in prioritizing the critical component for reliability-centered maintenance. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.