Maintenance applications of multi-criteria optimization: A review

Modern-day maintenance optimization decisions are complex problems which need to satisfy multiple and conflicting criteria. With increased applications and recent advances in multi criteria optimization (MCO) approaches, a review is needed to collate and categorize these advances in the Maintenance domain. This paper reports on a review of multi criteria models applied for solving maintenance optimization problems. The review process identified 259 publications in the MCO area. A generalized decision making process for addressing MCO problems is developed. A total of 150 publications addressing maintenance related MCO applications were selected and analyzed in this work. Over 100 popularly applied criteria, 21 alternatives and 24 constraints were identified when defining the MCO problem for maintenance. The results have illustrated two main classes of maintenance MCO problems as strategy selection and interval optimization. The strength of Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) MCO techniques for handling larger numbers of descriptive criteria make them more suitable for strategy selection problems while Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) have been the preferred choice for solving MCO interval optimization problems. Recently enhanced techniques in maintenance and related areas are highlighted and developments and improvements made noted. This work should assist researchers and practitioners in considering advanced MCO approaches.