Designing for maintenance: A game theoretic approach

Maintenance management is the effective and economical use of resources to keep equipment in, or restore it to, a serviceable condition. In this paper, maintenance considerations are introduced during product design using a game theoretic approach. Specifically, a product designer and a maintenance manager are modeled as two players in a Leader–Follower game, and strategies for designing product components are derived accordingly. To implement this approach, the compromise Decision Support Problem, with a deviation function adapted from linear physical programming, is used to model decisions mathematically. This approach is intended for distributed collaborative design in which modeling, computational or organizational factors hinder complete integration of all aspects of a design problem. Using this approach, the knowledge and expertise of each designer are fully utilized while keeping modeling and computational challenges at a tractable level. The approach is illustrated with a case example, namely, the design of a series of absorption chillers for an industrial complex.