A management decision model for discrete maintenance

The authors discuss the development of a procedure that allows maintenance managers to evaluate maintenance jobs quantitatively. The plan is especially applicable to those industries in which major maintenance items are dealt with during a finite period as opposed to continuously. Seasonal industries such as amusement parks or water parks are typical examples where major maintenance is scheduled during the period where the park is closed for the winter. Other applications include the transportation, space, and oil-field manufacturing industries. A maintenance job is defined as a repair or modification that needs to be performed on a facility or piece of equipment in order to improve its performance. When several defects must be fixed, a procedure for defining the priority of each job is required. The procedure developed quantifies the judgments of experts on the urgency of the jobs, and uses the resulting data in order to build a priority list of the set. The priority list is further reduced by introducing limits on resources. The procedure selects the maximum number of higher-ranked jobs that can be performed with the resources available