Assessment of distance-based multi-attribute group decision-making methods from a maintenance strategy perspective

Siew-Hong Ding,Shahrul Kamaruddin

doi:10.1007/s40092-014-0078-2

Siew-Hong Ding, Shahrul Kamaruddin

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40092-014-0078-2

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Abstract

Maintenance has been acknowledged by industrial management as a significant influencing factor of plant performance. Effective plant maintenance can be realized by developing a proper maintenance strategy. However, selecting an appropriate maintenance strategy is difficult because maintenance is a non-repetitive task such as production activity. Maintenance also does not leave a consistent traceable record that can be referred to during the decision-making process. The involvement of tangible and intangible factors in the assessment process further increases the complexity of the decision-making process. The technique of preference order by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is one of the most well-known decision- making methods and has been widely used by organiza- tions to conduct effective decisions regarding maintenance issues. TOPSIS has also evolved by integrating different approaches such as the fuzzy concept. Although numerous TOPSIS applications for maintenance decision making have been published, the effectiveness of crisp TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS needs to be investigated further. This paper attempts to present a comparison between conventional crisp TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS from a group mainte- nance decision-making perspective by an empirical illus- tration. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to demonstrate further the resilience of crisp TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS.

Highlights

Effective and efficient maintenance greatly depends on the type of maintenance strategy applied
Another study of the comparison between TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS chose the best facility layout among 18 possible designs (Maniya and Bhatt 2011); the results showed that both methods are ranked first in the alternative ranking
This paper has explored the use of crisp and fuzzy TOPSIS in solving the problems that surround maintenance strategy decision making

Summary

Introduction

Effective and efficient maintenance greatly depends on the type of maintenance strategy applied. Factor weight is the level of importance of related factors with respect to the overall goal After assessing the former, decision makers are required to provide suitable values that describe the score of the alternative against corresponding factors individually. Similar to the factor weights rating scale, the same rating value is adopted but with different descriptions for the maintenance strategy assessment ratings. Further analysis by using crisp TOPSIS is conducted after decision makers answer the questionnaire based on the described rating scale. The initial step of TOPSIS algorithm is to aggregate the rating of the factor weights and maintenance strategy assessment obtained from decision makers. The mean ratings regarding the m maintenance strategy under n factors obtained from Eqs. (1) and (2) are organized into the decision matrix D, as shown in Eq (3)

C1 C2 Á Á Á Cj 3

C2 C3 C4 C5 C6

Conclusions