Building a maintenance policy through a multi-criterion decision-making model

A major competitive advantage of production and service systems is establishing a proper maintenance policy. Therefore, maintenance managers should make maintenance decisions that best fit their systems. Multi-criterion decision-making methods can take into account a number of aspects associated with the competitiveness factors of a system. This paper presents a multi-criterion decision-aided maintenance model with three criteria that have more influence on decision making: reliability, maintenance cost, and maintenance downtime. The Bayesian approach has been applied to confront maintenance failure data shortage. Therefore, the model seeks to make the best compromise between these three criteria and establish replacement intervals using Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE II), integrating the Bayesian approach with regard to the preference of the decision maker to the problem. Finally, using a numerical application, the model has been illustrated, and for a visual realization and an illustrative sensitivity analysis, PROMETHEE GAIA (the visual interactive module) has been used. Use of PROMETHEE II and PROMETHEE GAIA has been made with Decision Lab software. A sensitivity analysis has been made to verify the robustness of certain parameters of the model.