Predict the priority of end-users’ maintenance requests and the required technical staff through LSTM and Bi-LSTM recurrent neural networks

Purpose This paper aims to develop predictive methods, based on recurrent neural networks, useful to support facility managers in building maintenance tasks, by collecting information coming from a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Design/methodology/approach This study applies data-driven and text-mining approaches to a CMMS data set comprising more than 14,500 end-users’ requests for corrective maintenance actions, collected over 14 months. Unidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) recurrent neural networks are trained to predict the priority of each maintenance request and the related technical staff assignment. The data set is also used to depict an overview of corrective maintenance needs and related performances and to verify the most relevant elements in the building and how the current facility management (FM) relates to the requests. Findings The study shows that LSTM and Bi-LSTM recurrent neural networks can properly recognize the words contained in the requests, thus correctly and automatically assigning the priority and predicting the technical staff to assign for each end-user’s maintenance request. The obtained global accuracy is very high, reaching 93.3% for priority identification and 96.7% for technical staff assignment. Results also show the main critical building elements for maintenance requests and the related intervention timings. Research limitations/implications This work shows that LSTM and Bi-LSTM recurrent neural networks can automate the assignment process of end-users’ maintenance requests if trained with historical CMMS data. Results are promising; however, the trained LSTM and Bi-LSTM RNN can be applied only to different hospitals adopting similar categorization. Practical implications The data-driven and text-mining approaches can be integrated into the CMMS to support corrective maintenance management by facilities management contractors, i.e. to properly and timely identify the actions to be carried out and the technical staff to assign. Social implications The improvement of the maintenance of the health-care system is a key component of improving health service delivery. This work shows how to reduce health-care service interruptions due to maintenance needs through machine learning methods. Originality/value This study develops original methods and tools easily integrable into IT workflow systems (i.e. CMMS) in the FM field.