yes / In modern chemical plants, it is essential to establish an effective maintenance strategy which will deliver financially driven results at optimised conditions, that is, minimum cost and time, by means of a criticality review of equipment in maintenance. In this article, a fuzzy logic-based criticality assessment system (FCAS) for the management of a local company’s equipment maintenance is introduced. This fuzzy system is shown to improve the conventional crisp criticality assessment system (CCAS). Results from case studies show that not only can the fuzzy logic-based system do what the conventional crisp system does but also it can output more criticality classifications with an improved reliability and a greater number of different ratings that account for fuzziness and individual voice of the decision-makers.

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- / Criticality-based maintenance (CBM) is a prioritized approach to the maintenance of (industrial) process equipment. CBM requires personnel with a thorough knowledge of the process/equipment under scrutiny. In this paper a criticality assessment system that is implemented by a local company (which represents the expertise and knowledge of the company experts) is reviewed and fuzzy logic theory is applied to improve the system's capability and reliability. The quality of the fuzzy system is evaluated based on several case studies. The results show that the fuzzy logic based system does not only what the conventional system does, but also outperforms in terms of reliability and has a unique ranking capability.