Decision theory in maintenance decision making

Abstract

Advances in decision theory have allowed it to make an effective contribution to the modelling of the decision‐making process. Research work on maintenance decision making using decision theory, however, has received little emphasis to date. For this reason, very little has been done in utilizing two very important decision theory topics, namely utility theory and multi‐attribute utility theory. Investigates possible contributions from decision theory to the maintenance area and develops a framework to solve maintenance decision problems. This framework includes elicitation of both utility functions and prior probability distributions, optimization and sensitivity analysis modules. Details this framework and applies it to a real‐life maintenance problem.