An improved MCDM method for maintenance approach selection: A case study of auto industry

In the current competitive environment, managers have been making attempts to convert organizations under their supervision into competitive and responsive through creating capability of timely delivery of quality products and services. In line with this, maintenance as a system plays an important role in achieving these goals. The maintenance strategy selection is a kind of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which requires considering a large number of complex factors as multiple evaluation criteria. A robust MCDM method should consider the interactions among criteria. The analytic network process (ANP) is a relatively new MCDM method, which can deal with all kinds of interactions systematically. Moreover, the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) not only can convert the relations between cause and effect of criteria into a visual structural model, but also can be used as a way to handle the inner dependences within a set of criteria. Hence, this paper proposes an effective solution based on a combined ANP and DEMATEL approach to help vehicle companies that need to evaluate and select maintenance strategies.