Development of maintenance strategy selection model using multi criteria decision making techniques

Abstract

Machineries are designed with the aim that their working systems should meet customer s demand with a predetermined excellent degree and optimize the usage of available manufacturing capacity. Over years, Machine age and so unplanned failures happen, leading to system functionality deviating from its initial condition. Therefore, the function of the system has to be periodically restored to the desirable level, this is accomplished by means of maintenance. Maintenance is a key contributor to the development and progress of manufacturing industries. It plays a vital role to reach the intended lifetime of equipments in an industry. The inadequate equipment maintenance leads to a greater level of unexpected asset failures, rework, scrap, order loss, increase in the production cost and penalty for late delivery. Effective utilization of machines can help to ensure timely implementation and completion of jobs, by reducing the turmoil and confusion made by manual way of execution process. They provide support to the manufacturer by providing improved output, reduced labour demand, and ease of work. Over the years, to support maintenance implementation in industry, different maintenance strategies have been developed. The maintenance engineer should choose the most appropriate maintenance strategy for equipment out of a set of potential alternatives. The selection of maintenance strategy is characterised by the need to satisfy multiple objectives, for example, the investment necessary for labour usage of the facility, security aspects, environmental problems, failure costs, reliability of the strategy, and implementation cost. A few of the aims taken as criteria cannot be expressed in monetary terms and it is hard to quantify them. Moreover, it consists of several contributory factors and attributes, inadequacy and vagueness in the information, and lack of modelling support for tangible and intangible cost and benefit factors. Hence, the Maintenance Strategy Selection (MSS) is regarded as an intricate Multiple Criteria