Special Session 15

SPECIAL SESSION #15

Gianpaolo Di Bona

Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy

• dibona@unicas.it

Antonio Forcina

Department of Engineering, University of Naples "Parthenope", Italy

• antonio.forcina@uniparthenope.it

Maintenance is one of the most crucial issues in today’s competitive manufacturing environment. Many companies think about maintenance as an inevitable source of cost. For these companies maintenance operations are a corrective function only executed in emergency conditions. Otherwise modern competition is focuses primarily on cost reduction in operations and maintenance, since machine failure may cause various business related problems such as: missing delivery dates, loss of reputation, direct and indirect loss of profit and opportunity. Maintenance costs vary from 15 to 70 percent of total production cost. The maintenance costs are usually high due to the high cost of restoring equipment, secondary damage and safety/health hazards inflicted by equipment failure. Several maintenance approaches have been developed and implemented through the evolution of maintenance. For these reasons, managers to must select the best maintenance policy for each unit or system from a set of possible alternatives (i.e. corrective, preventive, condition-based and predictive). This selection is particularly difficult during the start-up phase. Various multi-criteria decision making approaches have been proposed for maintenance strategy selection such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Fuzzy set theory, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Mathematical Programming, Factor Analysis, Sensitive Analysis and Technique for Order Preference by Similarities to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS).

Different maintenance alternatives were considered and different criteria and sub-criteria were evaluated using Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS) and production parameters.

This Special Issue seeks research papers on various aspects of multi-criteria models for selecting the best maintenance strategy in order to increase plant availability and reduce maintenance cost and the number of failures.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Maintenance Strategy;
• Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP);
• Fuzzy Logic;
• Technique for Order Preference by Similarities to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS);
• Failure Analysis;
• Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS).

Gianpaolo Di Bona is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Plants at University of Cassino and Southern Lazio. He received his doctorate in Civil and Mechanical Engineering from University of Cassino. His recent publications include ‘Assessment of the effectiveness of maintenance-oriented design’(International Journal of Engineering Business Management, 2014), “A-IFM reliability allocation model based on multicriteria approach” (International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management Vol.33 Issue 5 ISSN: 0265-671X), “Critical Flow Method: A New Reliability Allocation Approach for a Thermonuclear System” and “AHP-IFM Target: An Innovative Method to Define Reliability Target in an Aerospace Prototype Based on Analytic Hierarchy Process” (Quality and Reliability Engineering International ISSN:0748-8017), “An Analytical Model to Measure the Effectiveness of Safety Management Systems: Global Safety Improve Risk Assessment (G-SIRA) Method” (Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention December 2016, Volume 16, Issue 6, pp 1024–1037).
His research interests include RAMS analysis, process optimization, statistical process control, logistic and quality and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).