Abstract for: Justifying maintenance studying system behavior: a multi-purpose approach using multi-objective optimization (Best Poster Award

Industrial maintenance includes rich internal dynamic complexity on how to deliver value. While the technical development has provided with applicable solutions in terms of reliability and condition based monitoring, managing maintenance is still an act of balancing, trying to please the short-termism from the economic requirements and simultaneously address the necessity of strategic and long-term thinking. By presenting an analysis to justify maintenance studying system behavior, this paper exemplifies the contribution of the combined approach of a system dynamics maintenance performance model and multi-objective optimization. The paper reveals how insights from the investigation, of the near optimal Pareto-front solutions in the objective space, can be drawn using visualization of performance of selected parameters. According to our analysis, there is no return back to the single use of system dynamics; the contribution to the analysis of exploring system behavior, from applying multi-objective optimization, is extensive. However, for the practical application, the combined approach is not a replacement – but a complement. Where the interpretation of the visualized Pareto-fronts strongly benefits from the understanding of the model dynamics, in which important nonlinearities and delays can be revealed, and thus facilitate on the selected strategical path for implementation.