maintenance activities planning by integrating computer simulation and data envelopment analysis

many serious accidents have happened in the world, in which systems have been large-scale and complex, and caused heavy damage and a social sense of instability. furthermore, advanced nations have almost finished public infrastructure and rushed into a maintenance period. since maintenance is more important than production and construction, then more maintenance for environmental considerations and protection of natural resources is required. so, in the past four decades, valuable contributions to maintenance policies in the reliability theory have been made. in this paper, a maintenance planning problem is considered. first, maintenance activities are simulated via awesim. production and maintenance functions are estimated using historical data. then simulation is carried out for different scenarios which are combinations of periodic maintenance, and outputs are computed. since the problem is multi-criteria decision making, a data envelopment analysis (dea) method is used to select the preferred policy. finally the preferred alternative is selected to optimize the cost, reliability, availability, queue length and machine utilization.