Framework of machine criticality assessment with criteria interactions

Abstract

Criticality is considered as a fundamental category of production planning, maintenance process planning and management. The criticality assessment of machines and devices can be a structured set of activities allowing to identify failures which have the greatest potential impact on the company’s business goals. It can be also used to define maintenance strategies, investment strategies and development plans, assisting the company in prioritizing their allocations of financial resources to those machines and devices that are critical in accordance with the predefined business criteria. In a criticality assessment process many different and interacting criteria have to be taken into consideration, despite the fact that there is a high level of uncertainty related to various parameters. In addition, not all assessment criteria are equally important. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the weight of each criterion taking into account different requirements of machine criticality process stakeholders. That is why a novel model of a machine criticality assessment is proposed in this paper. The model extends the existing methods of assessing machines criticality, taking into account not only the importance of machine criticality assessment criteria, but also possible interactions between them.