Predicting Uncertain Behavior and Performance Analysis of the Pulping System in a Paper Industry Using PSO and Fuzzy Methodology

1. Introduction

Due to continuous advancement in technology, industrial systems are becoming complex and expensive to operate and maintain. In the modern day electronic, manufacturing and industrial systems, reliability and safety analysis and assessment of complex systems is becoming more and more difficult task due to the fact that the reliability and safety of manufacturing systems depend not only on all failed states of system components, but also on the sequence of occurrences of those failures (Birolini, 2007). However, failure is an unavoidable phenomenon associated with the technological advancement of the equipments used in all industries. Any unfortunate consequences of unreliable behavior of such equipments or systems have led to the desire for reliability analysis. Therefore. In recent years system reliability becomes an important issue in evaluating the performance of an engineering system by eliminating or reducing the likelihood of failures and thus increasing their desired life and operational availability.

To maintain the reliability of sophisticated systems to a higher level, the systems’ optimum structural design or highly reliable components of these systems are required, rather both of them may be sought simultaneously. Implementation of these methods to improve the system availability or reliability will normally consume resources such as cost, weight, volume etc. So the system reliability cannot be further improved effectively by considering these constraints. Replacement of lesser reliable components with highly reliable components can improve the system reliability but the cost constraints may violate. While improving the reliability of systems and their components, the associated cost also increases. Increasing attention needs to be given to reduce the cost during production, operation and maintenance of the systems. These objectives can be achieved with the reliability based design of the systems and optimization of the maintenance and operational activities in the industrial systems to ensure their full utilization. Thus. In the present scenario of global competition and faster delivery times, it is an important topic for decision-makers to fully consider the actual business and the quality requirement together. This is the reason why there is a growing interest in implementation and investigation of reliability principles for industrial systems.