A Voting Approach Applied to Preventive Maintenance Management of a Water Supply System

In developing countries, water distribution is a service that has limited resources for its expansion and modernization. Besides this problem, some regions suffer shortages of water. Thus, this resource is under-supplied to many communities. For this kind of situation, the planning of maintenance activities becomes even more important in order to reduce downtime due to system failures. Generally, more than one person may be involved in such kinds of decision-making processes. Thus, methods to aid group decision-making play an important role in finding a solution that captures different points of view. Therefore, this paper puts forward an approach for analyzing the preferences of water supply maintenance managers and includes the customer’s perspective in the decision process. The evaluation criteria are set in terms of seeking to establish the optimal interval for preventive maintenance. The alternative chosen based on the rankings from individual decision-makers (DMs) represents the best compromise from the perceptions of all DMs involved in this problem. The proposed approach to aggregate the DMs’ preferences is well suited to the context of maintenance management for a water supply system.