A Framework to Support Automobile Maintenance Decisions in Militaries Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract

The operational availability and reliability of automobiles significantly affect the smooth functioning of a military system. Militaries own massive automobile fleets, comprising automobiles with different capabilities. However, a military organization is unable to attend to all repair/ maintenance needs of its fleet concurrently, thus maintenance needs to be prioritized. Further, it is unobvious that a military organization equip adequate resources to attend all maintenance in-house, as a result, some portion of maintenance is to be outsourced. However, military expectations of outsourcing significantly deviate from a profitoriented business firm, thus identifying the right maintenance activity to be outsourced is crucial, but challenging. This paper develops a framework to support automobile maintenance decisions using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The framework provides an easier and simpler platform for maintenance prioritization and selecting the best maintenance approach i.e insourcing/ outsourcing. In the proposed approach, maintenance prioritization is achieved based on the criticality of automobiles. The criteria required for maintenance prioritization and maintenance approach selection are selected from previous literature. Then, their relative importance is calculated using AHP. Finally, two scoring models are developed to calculate automobile criticality and to select the maintenance approach. The simplicity of the scoring models makes them more user-friendly and numerical results enable fast, but wise decision-making for maintainers.