Assessing the impact of maintenance practices on asset's sustainability

Abstract

Maintenance practices can play a significant role in pursuing sustainable development in several industries. However, a general method to monitor and assess maintenance interventions’ impacts on environmental, social, and economic sustainability does not exist yet. To calculate a sustainability score, in this paper, we propose a methodology to quantify and measure the impacts of maintenance practices on sustainability performance. The proposed methodology uses available data and aggregates correlation algorithms with the best-worst method (BWM), a multi-criteria decision-making method. The proposed methodology can be applied to evaluate sustainability performance when a database for a set of sustainability-related indicators concerning maintenance activities is available. The purpose here is not to have a complicated methodology, but a simple one that can be easily applied in practice. For this purpose, the proposed methodology is implemented in a sustainability dashboard that can be used as a simple sustainability score calculator. A case study is developed to demonstrate the practical implications of the proposed sustainability dashboard. The findings demonstrate the efficiency of the methodology and suggest that it could work as a valuable tool for practitioners and academics to understand the impacts of maintenance practices on an asset's overall sustainability score (OSS).