Maintenance strategy selection: a comparison between fuzzy logic and analytic hierarchy process

Continued pressure on companies to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction has resulted in increasingly detailed examinations of maintenance practices and strategies. At the same time, the role of maintenance nowadays is shifting from the traditional necessary evil to a business chance. However, even if research in this area is on the rise nowadays, little work has been done in order to provide a model for the selection of the suitable maintenance strategy for each piece of equipment. This paper shows a comparison between two techniques, Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Logic, as Multi Criteria Decision Methods useful for selecting the most suitable maintenance strategy. The two models have been applied to a real case study carried out in an Italian manufacturing firm.