International Journal of Business and Management Studies,

CD-ROM. ISSN: 2158-1479 :: 1(2):265–272 (2012)

Copyright c 2012 by UniversityPublications.net

MULTI-CRITERIA APPROACH AND DECISION SUPPORT IN

MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

Youcef Smaili, Smail Adjerid and Mourad Houhou

University of M•hamed Bougara Boumerdes, Algeria

Maintenance is placed on the front of the scene for the emergence of environmental issues. It passes
from reference indicator function for evaluating the production tool performance to the function support
in the decision making and assessing environmental impacts of SMEs / SMIs. In this paper we present a
methodological approach for integrating multicriteria analysis tools in the evaluation of decision
making about improving companies performances, in order to minimize their environmental impacts
due to poor decision making in maintenance management. This is possible by combining the most
relevant requirements to a decision process and evaluation congruent with company policies. In this
context, maintenance has a major role in defining policy guidance. This will reduce the negative
maintenance impact and therefore the overall performance of the company.

Keywords: Environmental assessment, Maintenance management, Sustainable development.

1. Introduction

Maintenance is now a reference indicator for assessing the performance of a company. Indeed, it was
placed on the front of the scene for the emergence of environmental issues1. It's more than twenty years
that the report "Brundtland" introduced sustainable development as objective assigned to the international
community to confront the challenges of development and environmental protection. Recognition of this
concept was punctuated by the Earth Summits in Rio (1992) and Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg (2002).
This watchword was adopted by all industry actors; this notion changes our vision about the technics
of maintenance management. The environmental, health and safety in the workplace takes on a new
dimension. A need for clarification is necessary if we want to move from incantatory rhetoric to action.
The challenges facing the industry are at the height of new challenges: it is to determine the axes of
development that is economically efficient, socially equitable and ecologically correct or Viable and
sustainable. This is possible by combining the requirements most relevant to a decision process and
assessments congruent with company policies. In this context the maintenance function has a key role in
improving business performance.
In the literature few research are dedicated to evaluate and analyze the performance of maintenance,
however the most part are oriented to maintenance management in industrial systems [1], specifically in
the maintenance strategy [2], in the optimization of maintenance function [3] or the organization of the
maintenance function [4,5].
This is what led us in this paper to present a methodological approach for integrating multicriteria
analysis tools taking into account the issue of sustainable development into decision making in
maintenance management in SMEs / SMIs. Define the best strategy to achieve performance goals. The

265
266 Youcef Smaili, Smail Adjerid and Mourad Houhou

objective is to promote and disseminate tools for multicriteria decision beyond the academic context and
enhance maintenance at an evaluation function for an environmental global vision of the company.

2. Integration of the Environmental Assessment in Maintenance

Today, the possibilities for successful companies are focused on the competitive level that they can
achieve [6]. The maintenance policy is at the top of the decision tree. The evaluation in the policy covers
generally more flexible proposals and a wider range of scenarios. Policies, plans and programs are of
strategic order because they determine the direction or the general approach to be followed to achieve the
objectives. So the backward integration of environmental considerations in the decision tree is a vision
that improves performance of the company (Fig. 1).

maintenance
Policy

Master Plan of integration of environmental

Maintenance as s es s ment

Maintenance program

impact on
Maintenance Actions ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ the environmental

Figure 1. Integration of environmental assessment in decision!s pyramid in the maintenance management.

The main objective is the integration of environmental considerations into decision making in
industrial maintenance for durability of the company's performance.These plans and programs can be
used to examine their potential to reduce CO2 emissions and contribute to achieve the targets set under the
Kyoto Protocol [7, 8].

3. Advances in Maintenance Management

The optimization of the availability and the operational lifetime of operating équipment is part of any
companie!s performance. Safety is an important source of productivity; the cost becomes a major issue
[9]. Quality and reducing the environmental impact are all sources of profit. Maintenance management
whose primary mission is to ensure the dependability of the equipments contribute strongly in this
performance increasing.This essential role brings him to undertake to towards performance through
progressive approaches. To achieve that, the maintenance function must be able to use the assessing
methods to allow the level of performance of these actions. The various areas for evaluation are:
h the analysis operations techniques, economic and human
h The organization of maintenance (formalization of preparation needed, implementation, treatment
of hazards)
This is the foundation on which will extend the assessment of maintenance management system,
because it determines the whole improvement procedure as defined by the EN 13306/2010. The
evaluation is based on the following approach (Fig. 2).
The cutting out by zone allows an instant mapping of the location of equipment and in which we can
describe the risks of various maintenance activities and their interactions. This allows establishing the
action plans and maintenance programs in compliance with the requirements to achieve goals.
 Multi-Criteria Approach and Decision Support in Maintenance Management 267

Identify
responsibilities All the people, facilities
cutting out by work 1 and activities in the perimeter
areas

identify incidents
and risks C ollect the technical, regulatory and
identify activities by 2 accident /incident informations
area

define the
prioritization of actions
risk assessment and 3 the prioritization of actions based on risk
interactions between
area

ACTION PLAN

Figuer 2. The process to improve maintenance management.

4. The Multicriteria Analysis Methodology

The determination of appropriate management modes, their evaluation and their comparison are proposed
by using the techniques of multicriteria analysis.
This analysis technique aims to characterize a coherent family of criteria to clarify decision making
process [10].
The multicriteria character lies in the consideration of multiple objectives, diverse and possibly
contradictory. It is therefore by no means a technique to calculate the best solution, but to implement
techniques of analysis for:
h Design and / or justify and / or transform the preferences Into a decision process
h Help to make a decision or to evaluate several options in situations where no opportunity is
perfect
h Take Into account the different aspects, Even Irreconcilable: environmental, Technological,
Economic and Social ... etc.
The process of multicriteria analysis is composed of five successive steps [11, 12]:
1 Identify the overall objective approach and the type of decision;
2 List the possible solutions or options which can be envisaged;
3 List the criteria to take in consideration;
4 Evaluate each alternative with respect to each criterion;
5 Use an analysis method to compare these solutions.
The fifth phase is the comparative analysis that can be conducted using several techniques.
a) Coherence Analysis
b) Comparative analysis by implementing the multicriteria aggregation method (ELECTRE,
PROMETHEE, MACBETH ... etc..)
268 Youcef Smaili, Smail Adjerid and Mourad Houhou

4.1 Identification of Criteria Risk

In this context, several risk categories were identified:

h Environmental and climatic risks (pollution, major incidents ...),
h Technical risks of exploitation (failure, ...),
h Organisational Risks,
h Economic Risks,
h Legal and Regulatory Risks.

Economic:

.- C os t of Preventive Maintenance
- C os t of currative Maintenance
- C os t of intervention
- O verall cos t of maintenance
- ....
- E tc.
Potential
Criteria

safety

- E nvironmental impact Technique :

- Impact on quality
- Impact on H ealthy and Safety - R eliability
- .... - Maintainability
- E tc. - Availability
- etc. - ....
- E tc.

Figure 3. The possible criteria for assessing.

4.2. Identification of Technical Criteria

The technical criteria to be considered are essentialy related to the production tool availability namely:
 Reliability
 Maintainability
 Availabilty
The productivity, the growing and the company performance must be reconciled with the
requirements of the environment and sustainable development. So the choice of criteria to be adopted is
the basis of any making decisions. The different criteria for assessing that we suggest considering in our
study can be gathered around 03 axes: technical, economic and safety (Fig. 3).

5 Results

The results that we present are from multiple applications on the Maghrebians industrial scale. The
number of the participents is 45 companies from various industrial activities (Agrifood, Cosmetics,
Leather, Chemistries, and building materials) [13, 14, 15].
Since 2006 until 2010, the evaluation of maintenance actions by applications type shows that
maintenance operates in more than 40% of cases in planned activities for the operations with an
environmental impact and in 30% of cases in the security operations.
 Multi-Criteria Approach and Decision Support in Maintenance Management 269

Figure 4. Evolution of maintenance actions by type of interventions.

5.1 Identification of Maintenance Actions

The type of maintenance preventive !MP" or corrective !MC", to be applied is chosen from the technical,
economic and security criteria. The sub-criteria are respectively linked to reliability, maintainability and
the equipments availability for the technical criterion, maintenance costs for the economic criterion. The
Safety and environments impacts are evaluated with the materiel complexity criterion. The reliability
criterion is determined by Weibull assessing data and it is weighted as follow:

Table 1. The weighting of reliability.

ȕ 1 ȕ =1 1 ȕ 1.5 ȕ 1.5
MP Very low low good low
MC Very good good low low

For the analysis construction, we used the MACBETH approach. The qualitative assessment of
reliability and availability are showed in the Macsbeth software according to the thermometer scale as
follows:

Figure 5. Qualitative assessment of reliability and availability with MACBETH.

270 Youcef Smaili, Smail Adjerid and Mourad Houhou

The classification results are given in tables ranking represented by the following scenario:

Figure 6. Table for the prioritizing of maintenance actions.

Preventive maintenance is preferred with more than 80.23% from corrective maintenance estimated
at only 23.3%. The change in the overall rating on the choice of maintenance is important depending on
the weight of criteria. To improve performance it must more apply preventive maintenance and less of
corrective maintenance.

Figure 7. Sensitivity analysis on the reliability Figure 8. Sensitivity analysis on the complexity
criterion. criterion.

The sensitivity analysis shows that the criterion of complexity significantly increases the tendency of
the choice of preventive maintenance compared to corrective maintenance.
It is on the basis of these results that we decided for each equipment, in the first phase to eliminate
all the major technical risks with the corrective actions and in second phase, to establish a preventive
maintenance program taking into account all objectives (technics, safety, and environmentale).
 Multi-Criteria Approach and Decision Support in Maintenance Management 271

5.2 Impact of Maintenance Actions

The impact of maintenance on the availability of the production tool was measured by the frequency of
failures recorded since 2007 until 2010, after maintenance actions.

Table 2. Number of failures recorded between 2007/2010.

2007 2008 2009 2010

Before 637 465

After - 355 200 95

A reduction of more than 50% failures is recorded after 2008 with corrective maintenance actions.
Preventive actions have led to decrease to 75% of failures in 2010 compared to 2008. The environmental
impact has been assessed by the preventive maintenance actions performed and compared to an estimated
CO2 emitted before and after maintenance.

Table 3. Pourcentge of CO2 emitted after preventive maintenance.

2007 2008 2009 2010

Before 18% 17%

after - 15% 13% 10%

The increase in CO2 emissions is slowed appreciably by the actions of corrective maintenance first
and preventive in second phase from 2008.

6. Conclusion

The objective of this approach is dual, firstly to diffuse multicriteria decision tools beyond the academic
context, on the other hand to show how this approach is enhanced maintenance at an assessment function
that allows a global vision of the company and to improve their performances.The integration of
maintenance as an assessment environmental tool, coupled with the tools of decision support can reduce
the maintenance impact on the environment. After the results of this application in the different
companies we can hold that the maintenance managment has an important role to define the best strategic
direction, monitoring and evaluating the performance of SMEs / SMIs.

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272 Youcef Smaili, Smail Adjerid and Mourad Houhou

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