STOCHASTIC ANALYSIS OF A SINGLE UNIT SYSTEM WITH VARYING DEMAND AND MINOR-MAJOR FAILURES

Abstract

With the rapid increase of the societal requirements and the complexity of the industrial systems there is a great need to achieve high reliability without losing profitability. Small system failures might lead to huge loss of operational activities, downtimes and low productivity. In this paper, the authors propose a stochastic reliability model to analyze the availability and profitability of an industrial system under environmental factors and fluctuating demand. The proposed model assumes that it is a single unit system where there are no failures that can be tolerated. It is also equipped with an inspection mechanism to identify the kind of failure occurring in the system. The failures are called minor and major failures.Minor failures are caused by lubrication or greasing problems which can be repaired and major failures are caused by electrical short circuiting, water ingestion in the time of adverse weather and overloading as well as prolonged continuous operation . In case of major failures the system is either repaired or replaced depending upon the extent of damage. The two operating cases are studied where the demand is higher than or equal to the production and the demand is lower than the production. The regenerative point technique and Semi-Markov processes are used to evaluate key performance measures and profit thoroughly with respect to the effects of different parameters of the system.Data has been collected from a steel manufacturing plant, Rajpura, Punjab, India.The outcomes are very informative for the visited plant and provide suggestions for best management of inspection, maintenance, and operational strategies.