Stochastic analysis of edible oil refinery industry

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the sensitivity analysis in terms of failure/repair rates of subunits of an edible oil refinery system consisting of a number of subunits of varying nature. The system consists of four different subsystems namely Crusher unit (A), Filter and refining unit (B), Boiler and kettle unit (D), Neutralizer unit (E). Sub unit ‘A’ have components in parallel and other units have components in series, so if one or more components fail in unit ‘A’ than the system works in reduced capacity and other subunits fail when one or more components fail then that unit fails causing the whole system to a failed state. Fuzzy logic is used to declare the failure of a unit. Four processing units are working in series in order A, B, D, E, so if any of the units fail, the system fails. Taking constant failure and general repair rates for each subunit several measures of system effectiveness such as reliability, MTSF, busy period of the server, availability of the system and expected number of server’s visits etc. useful to industrial managers are obtained by using regenerative point technique followed by sensitivity analysis tables and graphs.