Maintenance is one of the most crucial issues in today’s competitive manufacturing environment. Many companies think about maintenance as an inevitable source of cost. For these companies, maintenance operations are a corrective function only executed in emergency situations. Otherwise, modern competition is focused primarily on cost reduction in operation and maintenance, since machine failure may cause various business-related problems such as missing delivery dates, loss of reputation, direct and indirect loss of profit, and loss of opportunity. Maintenance costs vary from 15 to 70 percent of the total production cost. The maintenance costs are usually high due to the high cost of restoring equipment, secondary damage, and safety/health hazards inflicted by equipment failure.

Several maintenance approaches have been developed and implemented through the evolution of maintenance. For these reasons, managers must select the best maintenance policy for each unit or system from a set of possible alternatives (i.e., corrective, preventive, condition-based, and predictive). This selection is particularly difficult during the start-up phase. Various multi-criteria decision-making approaches have been proposed for maintenance strategy selection such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Fuzzy set theory, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Mathematical Programming, Factor Analysis, Sensitive Analysis, and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Different maintenance alternatives are considered, and different criteria and sub-criteria are evaluated using Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS), and production parameters.

This Special Issue looks for research papers on various aspects of multi-criteria models for the selection of the best maintenance strategy. In particular, we want to emphasize the mathematical and modelling approaches put in place, also considering recent developments in predictive maintenance, to increase plant availability and reduce maintenance costs and the number of failures. Original research as well as review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Maintenance Strategy
• Algorithms for Predictive Maintenance
• Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
• Fuzzy Logic
• Technique for Order Preference by Similarities to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)
• Failure Analysis
• Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS)