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The sustainability of service and manufacturing operations rely heavily on the availability of equipment and assets. High availability of assets can be achieved with effective maintenance strategies. In this direction, we study a multi-skilled workforce planning problem to establish a resilient maintenance service network for high-value assets. We improve the efficiency of the maintenance network by optimising the workforce capacity in repair shops and achieving workforce heterogeneity by cross-training. As a solution strategy, we develop a two-stage iterative heuristic algorithm. At the first stage, the set of all feasible cross-training policies is effectively and systematically searched via a state-of-art multi-thread simulated annealing (MTSA) metaheuristic to find a policy(ies) that achieves the minimum cost. Further, the developed MTSA algorithm is enhanced with the multi-neighbourhood feature to escape from local …