A resilience engineering-based approach to improving service reliability in maintenance organizations

Resilience engineering (RE) has introduced new ideas into reliability engineering and safety science and has highlighted new concepts of safe work that could be considered for reliability improvement. The aim of this paper is to put forward an approach within the framework of resilience engineering to service reliability improvement in maintenance organizations. The strategy for reliability improvement is based on mutual learning through collaboration among maintenance departments of a public gas company in 11 districts. The proposed approach first assesses RE in the maintenance departments using a standardized questionnaire. Using a linear regression model, then the relationship between RE and service reliability in the maintenance departments is identified. Service reliability is defined as the probability of undesirable events: non-working valves, gas leaks, unavailability of valves due to coverage by asphalt, and gas flow cut-offs. The pros and cons of departmental collaborative learning in terms of absorbing the RE best practices, managerial or political conflicts, and collaboration costs are discussed. Finally, a linear integer programming is formulated to find the best collaborative connections so that the maintenance departments could find those peers from whom they can benefit most, boost their RE practice, and finally improve their service reliability, while minimizing their costs and possible conflicts.