A standard-based approach for multi-criteria performance evaluation of engineered systems

It is a common practice to periodically monitor the key performance indicators of an engineered system (ES) and quantitatively evaluate the system's ability to perform its functions. For a specific ES, the technical standards for managing its operations and maintenance are usually available and deal with multiple aspects. Therefore, the performance evaluation of ESs should use a standard-based multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach. It is different from the generic MCDA methods where the performance evaluation for alternatives is based on the decision matrices of alternatives. The literature on performance evaluation of ESs is vast but the literature on standard-based performance evaluation is very limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by proposing a standard-based MCDA approach for evaluating operational performance of ESs. The proposed approach derives the weights of the performance parameters and the parameters of their normalization functions based on the information specified in the technical standards. The robustness and weak compensation degree of the reverse quadratic mean model are identified and it can be used as an aggregation model. A real-world case study is included to illustrate the proposed approach and its usefulness.