An integrated simulation-data envelopment analysis approach for maintenance activities planning

Abstract

Advanced nations have almost finished public infrastructure and rushed into a maintenance period. From now on, the importance of maintenance will increase more and more. In this paper, maintenance activity planning problem is considered. First, maintenance activities are simulated by means of VisualSlam. Production and maintenance functions are estimated using historical data. Then simulation is carried out for different scenarios which are combinations of periodic maintenance and number of maintenance crew, and outputs are computed. Several outputs including machines and operators’ availability, reliability, efficiency and queue length are computed. Since the problem is multi-criteria, data envelopment analysis (DEA) method is used to select the preferred policy. To show the applicability and superiority of the proposed algorithm, the data for a series production line is used and different scenarios are investigated. The proposed approach of this study would help managers to identify the preferred strategy considering and investigating various parameters and scenarios.

Keywords:

• maintenance activities
• planning
• simulation
• data envelopment analysis
• correlation

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the valuable comments and suggestion from the respected reviewers. Their valuable comments and suggestions have enhanced the strength and significance of the paper.