Reliability, Availability and Maintainability Analysis of a Process Industry: a State of Art Review

The concept of reliability has been known for a number of years, but it has assumed greater significance and importance during the past decade, particularly due to impact of automation, development in complex missile and space programs. The manufacture of highly complex has served to focus greater attention on reliability. The complex products, equipments are made up of hundreds or thousands of components whose individual reliability determines the reliability of entire equipments. The importance of reliable operation has been realized in large complex process industries such as chemical, sugar, textile, paper plants and fertilizer plants etc. In these process plants to achieve the high availability and productivity, it is necessary that all systems/subsystems remain in upstate for a longer duration of time. However, these systems/subsystems are subjected to random failures due to poor design, lack of operative skills and wrong manufacturing techniques etc. causing heavy production losses. The plant working conditions and the repair strategies play an important role in maintaining the operating systems, operative for maximum duration i.e. optimal system availability. This can be accomplished only through performance evaluation and analysis of all the operating systems of the plant.