A New Ranking Method Approach for Decision Making in Maintenance Management

Abstract

Decision making process in maintenance management produces a final choice. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is proposed as a graphical representation of logical relationships between the elements that comprise the decision making process in maintenance management. A Fault Tree (FT) is compound by different events and logic gates. Complex systems analysis may produce thousands of combinations of events (cut-sets) that can cause the system failure. The determination of these cut-sets can be a large and time-consuming process even on modern computers. Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD) provides a new alternative to the traditional cut-set based approach for FTA that leads to the determination of the function output value through the examination of the input values. BDD is a directed acyclic graph that represents the Boolean functions. The cut sets generated by BDD will depend on the events ordering. The “Level”, “Top-Down-Left–Right”, “AND”, “Depth-First Search” and “Breadth-First Search” methods have been considered for listing the events, and a comparative analysis of them has been done. A new ranking approach is proposed in this paper, where its efficiency has been validated.