The safety case and the lessons learned for the reliability and maintainability case

This paper examine the safety case and the lessons learned for the reliability and maintainability case

Overview of Remaining Useful Life prediction techniques in Through-life Engineering Services

Through-life Engineering Services (TES) are essential in the manufacture and servicing of complex engineering products. TES improves support services by providing prognosis of run-to-failure and time-to-failure on-demand data for better decision making. The concept of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is utilised to predict life-span of components (of a service system) with the purpose of minimising catastrophic failure events in both manufacturing and service sectors. The purpose of this paper is to identify failure mechanisms and emphasise the failure events prediction approaches that can effectively reduce uncertainties. It will demonstrate the classification of techniques used in RUL prediction for optimisation of products’ future use based on current products in-service with regards to predictability, availability and reliability. It presents a mapping of degradation mechanisms against techniques for knowledge acquisition with the objective of presenting to designers and manufacturers ways to improve the life-span of components

A multi-objective framework for the optimisation of life-cycle costs of wind turbines

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Reliability assessment of manufacturing systems: A comprehensive overview, challenges and opportunities

Reliability assessment refers to the process of evaluating reliability of components or systems during their lifespan or prior to their implementation. In the manufacturing industry, the reliability of systems is directly linked to production efficiency, product quality, energy consumption, and other crucial performance indicators. Therefore, reliability plays a critical role in every aspect of manufacturing. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the most significant advancements and trends in the assessment of manufacturing system reliability. For this, we also consider the three main facets of reliability analysis of cyber–physical systems, i.e., hardware, software, and human-related reliability. Beyond the overview of literature, we derive challenges and opportunities for reliability assessment of manufacturing systems based on the reviewed literature. Identified challenges encompass aspects like failure data availability and quality, fast-paced technological advancements, and the increasing complexity of manufacturing systems. In turn, the opportunities include the potential for integrating various assessment methods, and leveraging data to automate the assessment process and to increase accuracy of derived reliability models

Comparison of different classification algorithms for fault detection and fault isolation in complex systems

Due to the lack of sufficient results seen in literature, feature extraction and classification methods of hydraulic systems appears to be somewhat challenging. This paper compares the performance of three classifiers (namely linear support vector machine (SVM), distance-weighted k-nearest neighbor (WKNN), and decision tree (DT) using data from optimized and non-optimized sensor set solutions. The algorithms are trained with known data and then tested with unknown data for different scenarios characterizing faults with different degrees of severity. This investigation is based solely on a data-driven approach and relies on data sets that are taken from experiments on the fuel system. The system that is used throughout this study is a typical fuel delivery system consisting of standard components such as a filter, pump, valve, nozzle, pipes, and two tanks. Running representative tests on a fuel system are problematic because of the time, cost, and reproduction constraints involved in capturing any significant degradation. Simulating significant degradation requires running over a considerable period; this cannot be reproduced quickly and is costly

A fuzzy Bayesian network approach for risk analysis in process industries

YesFault tree analysis is a widely used method of risk assessment in process industries. However, the classical fault tree approach has its own limitations such as the inability to deal with uncertain failure data and to consider statistical dependence among the failure events. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for the risk assessment in process industries under the conditions of uncertainty and statistical dependency of events. The proposed approach makes the use of expert knowledge and fuzzy set theory for handling the uncertainty in the failure data and employs the Bayesian network modeling for capturing dependency among the events and for a robust probabilistic reasoning in the conditions of uncertainty. The effectiveness of the approach was demonstrated by performing risk assessment in an ethylene transportation line unit in an ethylene oxide (EO) production plant