Selection of Business Specific Maintenance Criteria Using the Analytic Network Process (ANP)

The maintenance optimization criteria used in most of the maintenance optimization models are not addressing the business specific context of a company. Mostly only cost is taken into account and sometimes availability of the equipment. Safety only comes into the picture in very specific cases, like for example nuclear power plants. But there is never a clear proof that these criteria are the real objectives that need to be optimized to get to the optimal maintenance strategy. Moreover, there does not exist a clear cut method to determine which optimization criteria are important in certain environments, which makes it difficult to determine business specific maintenance optimization criteria. This can lead to suboptimal solutions to a maintenance optimization problem. Because there is no clear general method of how to perform maintenance optimization with the right objectives, all optimization models have a limited scope. The objective of this research is to develop a generic method to determine the maintenance optimization criteria for a business specific environment by applying the analytic network process (ANP). This ensures that the optimization objectives in a maintenance optimization model are the right ones, which assures that an optimal solution to the maintenance optimization problem is found. Of course it is also very important that the maintenance objectives are in line with the general business objectives of a company. The developed maintenance criteria selection tool is applied to two case studies. This selection method will be a first step in developing a generic maintenance optimization approach. After selection of the business specific maintenance criteria, these criteria and their corresponding weights will be used as objective functions in a maintenance optimization model.status: publishe