This work commenced in October 1992 with the support of an EPSRC grant under the supervision of Professor Alan Spedding and the late Professor Roy Holmes. The findings of the project are to be reported to the grant awarding body at the end of April 1996. Aims of research: a) to categorise the factors which determine the setting of priorities in maintenance work. b) to investigate weighted priority indexing of maintenance work and to test against current practice. c) to investigate the sensitivity of the prioritised jobs list to changes in weighting. Determining task importance, depends upon assessments which are essentially subjective and there is the problem of assigning numerical assessments to linguistic data. Although considerable professional experience may be brought to bear in determining the assessments and expected costs there tends to be darkness in the understanding of fundamentals underlying weighting systems. It is not easy to predict the impact a change in a set of weightings will have on the order of items of work in terms of which items will be affected and by how much. This project explored some of these issues using the Priority Index System developed at UWE which is a method for determining the order of importance, according to certain criteria, of items of work required to maintain properties. It has been implemented on the ACCESS data base and determines an index for each item of work which may be used as a basis for ranking the individual items of work. The value of a particular priority index is based on summing the products of the criteria and their corresponding management weightings to produce a single priority index ratio (PIR). The main conclusions are a) In practice, surveyors' returns revealed a broad pattern of assessment in providing data used in experiments. b) The weightings adopted were found to be a good approximation to the results. c) The relationship between PIR and order could be closely approximated by cubic functions/curves and that such calculated PIR curves could play a useful part in summarising the data as they are accumulated by management, and hence provide a predictive tool. d) Although developed around the UWE Priority Indexing System, the methodology adopted applies to the comparison of any ordered lists of work regardless of the underlying prioritising method(s) used to create the ordered lists.

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