Reliability evaluation and component importance measure for manufacturing systems based on failure losses

Little work has been done to assess the reliability of a vital system like the manufacturing system. In this article, a novel and effective system reliability evaluation method in terms of failure losses has been proposed for manufacturing systems of job shop type, and then the failure losses based component importance measure (CIM) is used for importance analysis of equipment. The former indicates the present system reliability situation and the latter points the way to reliability improvement efforts. In this scheme, the problem is described and modeled by a dynamic directed network. Consider that the actual processing time of machines is to contribute to failure occurrence, it is used to calculate the failure times and failure losses. The obtained total failure times and failure losses of the system are applied to evaluate its reliability. Techniques to estimate two kinds of failure losses based CIMs are presented. They offer guidelines to realize system reliability growth cost-effectively. A case study of a real job shop is provided as an example to demonstrate the validity of the proposed methods. Comparison to other commonly used methods shows the efficiency of the proposed methods.