Developing the R-TOPSIS methodology for risk-based preventive maintenance planning: A case study in rolling mill company

The importance of day-to-day maintenance has increased because it plays a vital role in maintaining and improving the availability, product quality, safety requirements, and low costs for organizations. There are numerous ways to plan and decide on the maintenance problems, where multi-criteria decision making is one of the fundamental tools. However, in many organizations, especially where information about the likelihood of equipment failure is low, the use of quantitative models is not feasible. Furthermore, because of the dynamic nature of maintenance and the existence of unpredicted or unplanned factors of the equipment reliability, planning the tasks becomes more difficult. Hence, this paper presents a novel fuzzy model to express fuzzy reliability and takes into consideration the risk and error of taking possible influential factors. Moreover, new concepts, such as positive and negative risks, positive and negative acceptable risks, and risk-based TOPSIS methodology for preventive maintenance planning in a multi-period time horizon, have been developed. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, a real case study is presented for one of the strategic units in a rolling mill company.