Journal of Health and Safety at Work

Introduction: Choosing maintenance strategy is one of the most complex and essential processes that can affect the safety and cost of equipment. The main aim of this study was to determine a risk-based maintenance policy for improvement of the safety and maintenance indices.

Material and Method: According to literature reviews and constraints associated with the studied industry, a number of safety and maintenance indices were selected and their values were measured. Next, in order to promote the selected indices, the best policy was implemented on nine critical machines of the company based on criteria such as cost, risk and availability in the framework of the fuzzy network analysis process. Finally, after six months period, the indices were re-measured. The Wilcoxon test was used to assess the changes in the indices.

Result: In the implementation of the model, condition based maintenance was more effective than other strategies. Following the intervention, the improvement of safety and maintenance indices was statistically significant. The statistical analyses demonstrated that indices like reliability, availability, mean time between failures, and the number of dangerous failures all were improved significantly (P<0.05).

Conclusion: The results showed that the simultaneous use of three criteria, i.e. cost, risk and availability in maintenance planning could reduce equipment-related accidents. Finally, the recommended model can improve the efficiency and competitiveness of organizations by increasing availability and reducing equipment costs