Marine shipping is an important aspect of the transportation system in Canada. It is estimated that 70-80% of items that we are surrounded by and use daily are brought by ships.
Canadian businesses need to sell to the world and ships carries their products abroad. For people that live in Canada’s island or northern communities, marine shipping is often the only source they have for essentials.
It is estimated that marine shipping directly contributes about $3 billion annually to Canada’s GDP through employment and other impacts. In a marine ship system, safety and reliability are very important considerations. The various system elements must be properly maintained and organizations are now looking to maintenance optimization to achieve optimum safety, machinery reliability and reduced costs.
Modern day maintenance optimization is a decision-making problem which need to satisfy multiple and conflicting criteria. Multi-Criteria Optimization (MCO) techniques have been used in maintenance optimization.
Two main classes of maintenance MCO problems have been identified as strategy selection and interval optimization. In marine ships, maintenance strategy selection is a complex decision-making problem that has become ever more challenging to address and is accompanied by diverse constraints and economic considerations. Each maintenance strategy has its own characteristics, importance and drawbacks.
The use of inappropriate maintenance strategy affects the safety of a ship, crew, machinery reliability, maintenance cost etc. MCO techniques have been used in selecting optimal maintenance strategy for ship onboard machinery.
