Determination of a maintenance strategy for machinery systems of autonomous ships

This paper proposes a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making approach to determine the best maintenance strategy for the machinery systems in autonomous ships of different levels of autonomy. The proposed methodology includes the Analytic Hierarchy Process to identify criteria weighting and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution to determine the best maintenance alternative. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to determine the impact of criterion weighting on the calculated rank scores and to reveal the criticality of the criteria. The study presents and considers various hybrid maintenance strategies for autonomous ship concepts as possible maintenance alternatives. The selection of the maintenance policy that combines condition-based and time-based approaches for 3rd and 4th levels of ship autonomy, as the best maintenance alternative, demonstrates the basic idea of the study. In addition, the key findings of the paper ensure crucial insights to the maritime industry in the decision-making process on the maintenance strategy that can be adapted to different types of autonomous ship concepts.