A methodology proposal towards scheduling of ship repair and maintenance operations

On a global scale, the majority of goods transported internationally travel by sea. Despite the significant role of maritime transportation in supporting international trade and commerce, the volume and complexity of international regulations continues to increase. This inevitably creates additional costs for ship operators, requires business managers to comply with ever-growing regulations as a cost of doing business, and makes it harder for companies to be profitable. In this environment, increasing or even maintaining profits requires ship-owners to reduce operating costs, which is often achieved by reducing personnel or cutting maintenance expenses. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to achieve maintenance targets to support decision-makers in identifying the appropriate places to make economies. Implementation of particular maintenance approaches, such as preventive, predictive, or corrective maintenance, is not, in itself, sufficient to maintain or increase profits because of the multiple factors that affect the business environment, including supply, logistics, safety, operations, and regulations. Nevertheless, the overlapping of maintenance activities in such a way as to reduce both the time allocated for these activities, and the costs of logistics and labour, can increase efficiency. Within the maintenance literature, most research examines failure prediction, studying different approaches for increasing the running time of machinery while identifying failures early. Continuing this pattern of enquiry, this study uses multi-criteria decision-making tools to develop mathematical models for focused decision problems. The DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) methodology is used to identify important company maintenance policies and targets, and SMAA (Stochastic Multi-objective Acceptability Analysis) is applied to support the analysis of the criteria used as inputs for ranking maintenance alternatives in different scenarios. In the demonstration phase, an illustrative case is used to analyse the maintenance operation scheduling for the main engine of a new-build LNG vessel. Subsequently, a methodology for maintenance operations scheduling is developed and demonstrated