A Multicriteria Method to Form Optional Preventive Maintenance Plans: A Case Study of a Large Fleet of Vehicles

Motor vehicles are composed of a large number of parts, and planning the maintenance activities of different parts is a crucial decision that affects system reliability, operation costs, and capacity requirements of service providers. We propose a systematic method to determine the critical parts that should be handled with extra preventive maintenance (PM) and prepare alternative PM plans with different levels of cost and capacity usage. Our method uses a multicriteria decision-making approach to determine the critical parts and conducts statistical reliability analysis with failure data and expert knowledge to create the maintenance plans. We use the proposed method in a case study to determine optional PM packages that would support regular PM practices in the after-sales service of a large motor vehicle manufacturer. The main aim of the case study is to increase the satisfaction of customers who are more sensitive to failures, such as carriers of food and medical supplies. The results show that the optional PM packages can decrease the cost of failures while obeying the capacity limitation of the company.