Högskolan i Skövde

Managing maintenance within an economical short-termism framework, without considering the consequential long-term cost effect, is very common in industry. This research presents a novel conceptual system dynamics model for the study of the dynamic behaviors of maintenance performance and costs, which aims to illuminate insights for the support of the long-term, strategic development of manufacturing maintenance. By novel, we claim the model promotes a system's view of maintenance costs that include its dynamic consequential costs as the combined result of several interacting maintenance levels throughout the constituent feedback structures. These range from the applied combination of maintenance methodologies to the resulting proactiveness in production, which is based on the rate of continuous improvements arising from the root cause analyses of breakdowns. The purpose of using system dynamics is to support the investigations of the causal relationships between strategic initiatives and performance results, and to enable analyses that take into consideration the time delays between different actions, in order to support the sound formulation of policies to develop maintenance and production performances. The model construction and validation process has been supported by two large maintenance organizations operating in the Swedish automotive industry. Experimental results show that intended changes can have both short and long-term consequences, and that obvious and hidden dynamic behavioral effects, which have not been reported in the literature previously, may be in the system. We believe the model can help to illuminate the holistic value of maintenance on the one hand and support its strategic development as well as the organizational transformation into proactiveness on the other.

Industrial maintenance includes rich internaldynamic complexity on how to deliver value. While the technical development hasprovided with applicable solutions in terms of reliability and condition basedmonitoring, managing maintenance is still an act of balancing, trying to pleasethe short-termism from the economic requirements and simultaneously address thenecessity of strategic and long-term thinking. By presenting an analysis tojustify maintenance studying system behavior, this paper exemplifies thecontribution of the combined approach of a system dynamics maintenanceperformance model and multi-objective optimization. The paper reveals howinsights from the investigation, of the near optimal Pareto-front solutions inthe objective space, can be drawn using visualization of performance ofselected parameters. According to our analysis, there is no return back to thesingle use of system dynamics; the contribution to the analysis of exploringsystem behavior, from applying multi-objective optimization, is extensive.However, for the practical application, the combined approach is not areplacement – but a complement. Where the interpretation of the visualizedPareto-fronts strongly benefits from the understanding of the model dynamics, inwhich important nonlinearities and delays can be revealed, and thus facilitateon the selected strategical path for implementation.

Identifying sustainable strategies to develop maintenance performance within the short-termism framework is indeed challenging. It requires reinforcing long-term capabilities while managing short-term requirements. This study explores differently applied time horizons when optimizing the tradeoff between conflicting objectives, in maintenance performance, which are: maximize availability, minimize maintenance costs, and minimize maintenance consequence costs. The study has applied multi-objective optimization on a maintenance performance system dynamics model that contains feedback structures that explains reactive and proactive maintenance behavior on a general level. The quantified results provide insights on how different time frames are conditional to enable more or less proactive maintenance behavior in servicing production.

Managing maintenance and its impact on business results is increasingly complex, calling for more advanced operational research methodologies to address the challenge of sustainable decision-making. This problem-based research has identified a framework of methods to supplement the operations research/management science literature by contributing a hybrid simulation-based optimization framework (HSBOF), extending previously reported research.

Overall, it is the application of multi-objective optimization (MOO) with system dynamics (SD) and discrete-event simulation (DES) respectively which allows maintenance activities to be pinpointed in the production system based on analyzes generating less reactive work load on the maintenance organization. Therefore, the application of the HSBOF informs practice by a multiphase process, where each phase builds knowledge, starting with exploring feedback behaviors to why certain near-optimal maintenance behaviors arise, forming the basis of potential performance improvements, subsequently optimized using DES+MOO in a standard software, prioritizing the sequence of improvements in the production system for maintenance to implement.

Studying literature on related hybridizations using optimization the proposed work can be considered novel, being based on SD+MOO industrial cases and their application to a DES+MOO software.