Optimum maintenance strategy: a case study in the mining industry

Managers face with the problem of decision‐making for selecting suitable maintenance strategy because of the emergence of different maintenance strategies for systems and equipments. Considering implementation methods and strengths and weaknesses of each maintenance strategy, simultaneous employment of these strategies may result in improvement or reduction of organisational performance. The main purpose of this paper is to consider interdependency of maintenance strategies to find the most suitable maintenance strategy for equipments. While the problem of selecting a suitable maintenance strategy can be solved by multi‐criteria decision‐making, the approach of analytic network process (ANP) has been suggested due to its network structure and its capability in counting the interdependency of maintenance strategies. As a case study, an attempt has been made to propose the most suitable maintenance strategies for a category of equipments in Chadormalu Mining‐Industrial Company by the ANP approach. The findings imply that the priorities of maintenance strategies include TPM, CBM, DOM, TBM, EM, respectively. Also, maintainability and reliability have been found as the main reasons of higher rankings of TPM and CBM strategies.