Operational behaviour and reliability measures of a viscose staple fibre plant including deliberate failures

This Paper deals with the stochastic behavior and failure analysis of a Viscose Staple Fibre Plant which produces fibre for making clothes. The fibre making plant is a complex system with various subsystems as: Vendor (supplies Charcoal and Sulphur, raw materials for the process), Carbon di sulphide Plant, Acid Plant, Pulp Plant and Processing Plant. The considered system can completely fail due to failure of any of the subsystems. The Carbon di Sulphide Plant can fail in two different ways, due to lack of Sulphur or Charcoal. Processing Plant has the configuration 5-out-of-10: d and 6-out-of-10: f. It is also assumed that the system can fail due to workers strike and catastrophic failure. All failures follow exponential time distribution whereas all repairs follow general time distribution. Preventive Maintenance policy has been applied to reduce the failure in the system. Various reliability characteristics such as transition state probabilities, steady state behavior, reliability, availability, M.T.T.F and the cost analysis have been obtained using supplementary variable technique and Gumbel-Hougaard copula methodology.