Title: A hesitant fuzzy model for ranking maintenance strategies in small and medium-sized enterprises

Authors: Mohsen Shafiei Nikabadi; S. Behnam Razavian

Addresses: Industrial Management Department, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran ' Industrial Management Department, Binaloud Institute of Higher Education, Khorasan-e-Razavi, Mashhad, Iran

Abstract: Presently, the topic of ranking is very significant. Most of real world affairs can be solved by using decision-making techniques. Selecting and ranking of maintenance strategies are sometimes complicated. They have no proper structure and also have multi-criteria viewpoint. Hence, proper selecting and ranking could be considered as a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM). Consequently, the main goal of this research is selecting the best maintenance strategy by applying factor analysis (FA) technique and also decision-making methods in the hesitant fuzzy domain. In this study firstly by applying literature and experts' viewpoints on maintenance, the variables and their sub-variables were identified. Then, to reduce the number of variables, the factor analysis method was used. Additionally, to calculate the weights of sub-variables De Luca-Termini, which is a normalised hesitant entropy method, was applied. Finally, the strategies were ranked by using hesitant fuzzy VIKOR method. According to this research, the maintenance strategy based on reliable has higher priority in comparison with the others.

Keywords: maintenance; factor analysis; De Luca-Termini entropy; hesitant fuzzy VIKOR; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2020.106424

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2020 Vol.29 No.4, pp.558 - 592

Received: 12 Jun 2018
Accepted: 19 Dec 2018
Published online: 06 Apr 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article