Budgeting for Facility Maintenance and Repair. II: Multicriteria Process for Model Selection

The second of two in a series, this paper presents an objective process for selecting an appropriate model for facility maintenance and repair budgeting. Three model evaluation criteria relating facility attributes to maintenance and repair costs—consideration of the facility's physical characteristics and environment, building system and component life cycles, and penalty costs brought on by deferral of maintenance—are introduced. The expense of supplying the necessary data for a model's implementation, given the model user's existing database, is presented as a fourth evaluation criterion. The relative merits of 18 available budgeting models are then assessed against these criteria using various multicriteria decision-making tools: Analysis of dominance, with results displayed via a Hasse diagram; lexicographic ordering; and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution. The results of the evaluation demonstrate how the preferred alternative can change in response to a decision-maker's priorities. Conversely, the selection process can provide considerable insight into these models with very little knowledge about the value system or philosophy of the model users and the decision makers.