Justifying Maintenance Studying System Behavior : A Multipurpose Approach Using Multi-objective Optimization

Industrial maintenance includes rich internaldynamic complexity on how to deliver value. While the technical development hasprovided with applicable solutions in terms of reliability and condition basedmonitoring, managing maintenance is still an act of balancing, trying to pleasethe short-termism from the economic requirements and simultaneously address thenecessity of strategic and long-term thinking. By presenting an analysis tojustify maintenance studying system behavior, this paper exemplifies thecontribution of the combined approach of a system dynamics maintenanceperformance model and multi-objective optimization. The paper reveals howinsights from the investigation, of the near optimal Pareto-front solutions inthe objective space, can be drawn using visualization of performance ofselected parameters. According to our analysis, there is no return back to thesingle use of system dynamics; the contribution to the analysis of exploringsystem behavior, from applying multi-objective optimization, is extensive.However, for the practical application, the combined approach is not areplacement – but a complement. Where the interpretation of the visualizedPareto-fronts strongly benefits from the understanding of the model dynamics, inwhich important nonlinearities and delays can be revealed, and thus facilitateon the selected strategical path for implementation