Proposal of a Framework for Evaluating the Importance of Production and Maintenance Integration Supported by the Use of Ordinal Linguistic Fuzzy Modeling

Over the years, the integration of Production Management and Maintenance Management has gained significant attention from the scientific community due to its benefits for the company. When searching through the states of the art and practice, it is possible to understand that one of the main challenges for the integration is the lack of systematic, methodological, and scientific approaches and evaluation systems that lead companies into a successful implementation and a clear understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of the process. This paper introduces an original framework that conducts the processes of evaluation, weighting, and aggregation of set of novel indicators proposed by the authors. The main output of the proposal is an integral index that allows us to qualify, in a linguistic domain, the importance of the Production and Maintenance Management integration. At the same time, the proposed framework includes a methodology to evaluate the consensus of the experts, based on the use of linguistic terms with a membership function of the triangular type, which attempts to overcome some deficiencies of previous models identified by the authors in a detailed and complex analysis of the scientific literature. The proposed framework is applied in a plant of the Cuban mechanical industry. The results of this application are clearly presented and discussed, allowing us to verify and validate the proposal while also contributing to its ease of understanding and ultimately to the successful integration of the production and maintenance tasks in the given company.