Prioritizing equipments for preventive maintenance activities using fuzzy rules

Maintenance, as a support function in businesses, plays an important role in backing up any emerging business and operation strategies. It is required to maximize the reliability of equipment and systems. Among them, preventive maintenance (PM) involves the repair, replacement, and maintenance of equipment in order to avoid unexpected failure during use. The objective of any PM program is the minimization of the total cost of inspection and repair, and equipment downtime (measured in terms of lost production capacity or reduced product quality). Maintenance activities have been regarded as a necessary expense that belongs to the operating budget. But since, organizational resources are limited and scarce, prioritizing equipments for assigning resources is essential. In this paper, fuzzy rules are used to interpret linguistic variables for determination of priorities. Using this approach, such verbal expressions, which cannot be explicitly analyzed or statistically expressed, are herein quantified and used in decision making.