Multicriteria Model of Preventive Maintenance

Abstract

It is extremely important to guarantee that the performance levels required by productive systems can be maintained. As well, it is essential to assure the quality of process outputs.
For this reason, preventative maintenance has become a very useful instrument to gain a competitive edge. In maintenance decisions, there are some contradictory criteria or points
of view that are vital and must to be looked at simultaneously. Optimization approaches are not so useful in this situation, since usually no decision or solution exists which is the best
from all points of view at the same time. So, in this context, the multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) approach is very important, allowing not only for the trade-off of multiple factors,
but also taking in account the preference structure of the decision-maker with respect to these contradictory criteria. To address this issue, this article proposes a multicriteria
decision aid model to support the decision-maker in the choice of times for preventative maintenance. The model preserves some important concepts from the classic models of
component replacement and improves an existing multicriteria model, by taking criterion downtime into consideration, making a more appropriate treatment possible than the previous model for situations in cases where repair time cannot be ignored.