Selection of the best maintenance approach in the maritime industry under fuzzy multiple attributive group decision making environment

Many maintenance approaches have been developed and applied successfully in a variety of sectors such as aviation and nuclear industries over the years. Some of those have also been employed in the maritime industry such as condition based maintenance; however choosing the best maintenance approach has always been a big challenge due to the involvement of many attributes and alternatives which can be also associated with multiple experts and vague information. In order to accommodate these aspects, and as part of an overall novel Reliability and Criticality Based Maintenance (RCBM) strategy, an existing Fuzzy Multiple Attributive Group Decision Making (FMAGDM) technique is employed in this study, which is further enhanced with the use of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to obtain a better weighting of the maintenance attributes used. The FMAGDM technique has three distinctive stages, namely rating, aggregation and selection in which multiple experts’ subjective judgments are processed and aggregated to be able to arrive at a ranking for a finite number of maintenance options. To demonstrate the applicability in a real life industrial context, the technique is exemplified by selecting the best maintenance approach for shipboard equipment such as the Diesel Generator (DG) system of a vessel. The results denote that preventive maintenance is the best approach closely followed by predictive maintenance, thus steering away from the ship corrective maintenance framework and increasing overall ship system reliability and availability.