Selection of industrial maintenance strategy: Classical AHP and fuzzy AHP applications

Abstract

The selection of a maintenance strategy is a decision often made with uncertainty or subjectivity. This decision involves the prioritization of critical factors since there are several factors to be considered simultaneously. Decision-making generally depends on subjective assessments from experts. To deal with multiple factors, Analytic Hierarchy Processes (AHP) is a well-established multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method. This article presents an AHP application for the selection of a maintenance strategy by a real industrial plant. Four maintenance strategies are considered: Corrective Maintenance, Preventive Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance, and Proactive Maintenance. Decision criteria are cost, quality, safety, value added and viability. Then, incorporating the concepts of the fuzzy set theory, fuzzy AHP was applied to the same decision problem. In both applications, Corrective Maintenance was the strategy with the highest priority, and value added was the highest priority criterion. With the classical AHP application, some comparison matrices produced Consistency Ratios (CR) greater than 0.10, possibly generated by mistakes or misunderstandings from experts. However, the same result was obtained from fuzzy AHP and validated the result obtained from classical AHP application. The major contribution of the paper is the evidence that Fuzzy AHP may be a useful tool to solve the consistency problems in classical AHP applications.