ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS APPROACH FOR SELECTION AND EVALUATION OF MAINTENANCE STRATEGY

Selection of suitable maintenance strategy has always been vital for the industries. The selection deals with the large number of tangible and intangible attributes. Estimation of the optimal maintenance strategies for the different failure modes represents the main complexity of the selection process. Equipment, as well as the available maintenance facilities, tools and capabilities delimit the selection of the type of maintenance. In many cases, the selection requires the knowledge of various factors such as safety aspects, environmental problems, costs and budget constraints, manpower utilization and etc.
This project presents Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach to define the best strategies for maintenance of mechanical systems or equipment. The main objective is to develop an application, which would assist in quick selection of maintenance strategy using AHP. User friendly application is developed to assist the user in selection, and weighting the criterions and alternatives. The final output is the scores of each maintenance strategy that will aid in ranking. However, the user is also offered predetermined sets of weightings of criterions and alternatives that are dependent on risk analysis results. Since risk contributes towards decision making by affecting the weighting considerations, the classic definition of risk that accounts both the probability and consequence of accident or failure is also considered, and equipment can be categorized into four risk zones based user’s judgment or assessment results, if any conducted. The developed decision framework is tested for validity of results with help of two case studies. The results obtained prove the validity of developed framework.