An ontology model for maintenance strategy selection and assessment

Within maintenance management activities, engineers need to select maintenance strategies so to carry out the technical maintenance actions. A single equipment is composed of several components with different failure modes. There should be a maintenance strategy for each of them; while some of the components can be run-to-failure applying corrective maintenance, some others cannot afford a failure, and preventive or predictive strategies should be implemented. Selecting and assessing maintenance strategies is a complex task for which information from many sources should be retrieved. Information from a Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis, a cost–benefit-risk analysis, Computational Maintenance Management Systems, is often used by engineers to select and assess maintenance strategies. A selected strategy is often not evaluated over time to check its effectiveness. The strategy may need adjustments or substituted by a more efficient one, for example, a condition-based strategy substituting a time-based one. To facilitate maintenance strategies selection and assessment, the current study proposes an Ontology model for Maintenance Strategy Selection and Assessment (OMSSA). OMSSA serves as a formal terminology framework in maintenance strategies that can be used to develop smart computational agents that can help in the decision-making process for selecting and assessing maintenance strategies. To facilitate its future reuse and integration with other ontologies in the industrial domain, OMSSA builds following the state-of-the-art in ontology development by using a top-level domain-neutral ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology.