Assessment of distance-based multi-attribute group decision-making methods from a maintenance strategy perspective

Maintenance has been acknowledged by industrial management as a significant influencing factor of plant performance. Effective plant maintenance can be realized by developing a proper maintenance strategy. However, selecting an appropriate maintenance strategy is difficult because maintenance is a non-repetitive task such as production activity. Maintenance also does not leave a consistent traceable record that can be referred to during the decision-making process. The involvement of tangible and intangible factors in the assessment process further increases the complexity of the decision-making process. The technique of preference order by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is one of the most well-known decision-making methods and has been widely used by organizations to conduct effective decisions regarding maintenance issues. TOPSIS has also evolved by integrating different approaches such as the fuzzy concept. Although numerous TOPSIS applications for maintenance decision making have been published, the effectiveness of crisp TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS needs to be investigated further. This paper attempts to present a comparison between conventional crisp TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS from a group maintenance decision-making perspective by an empirical illustration. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to demonstrate further the resilience of crisp TOPSIS and fuzzy TOPSIS.