MCDA Techniques in Maintenance Policy Selection

Traditionally maintenance departments have taken decisions based on their experience or supported by the advice of system sales staff or consultants. In other functions, however, decisions are taken, increasingly, based on techniques which provide an optimal, objective decision, which guarantees that it can be justified to management. Thus, maintenance departments of companies should begin to use these techniques in decision-making. Among these techniques is Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) which, due to its versatility, ease of application in some cases and excellent results in different areas of application, could increase the role of maintenance in companies and help to achieve world-class competitiveness. There are very many mathematical models techniques for optimization applied to maintenance (Wang, 2012), but most of them optimize a specific maintenance policy and have an important mathematical component which makes it impossible in practice to apply these models to industry. Nevertheless, the applicability of these models to solving real problems is a key question in maintenance (Scarf, 1997) and can be one of many reasons why there is low efficiency in maintenance in industry at the moment. There exist, in the maintenance field, many literature reviews, such, for example Baker and Christer (1994), Christer (1999), Garg and Deshmukh (2006), Dhillon and Liu (2006), Kans (2009), Sharma, Yadava, and Deshmukh (2011), Simões, Gomes, and Yasin (2011), Wang (2012), and Prajapati, Bechtel, and Ganesan (2012). There is however no article which analyzes the contributions made by applying MCDA to maintenance, unlike the large number of papers which review the literature in other fields. This chapter, therefore, sets out a review of the literature which brings together articles that apply MCDA techniques for decision-making in the choice of maintenance policy. The most commonly applied MCDA, trends in the number of contributions, the criteria applied, and possible gaps that could lead to interesting future work are suggested. Although the number of contributions is much lower than in other areas, the aim is to show those which do exist and to favour the practical application of MCDA in maintenance so as to guarantee the success of decisions in this field.