Modeling Periodical Inspection and Early Failure Detection in BlockSim

To improve availability, integrity, productivity and safety, many organizations implement regular monitoring of critical parts of the system, enabling regular feedback about the status of the equipment and the degradation over time before reaching failure. This allows quick response to disturbances and helps avoid unplanned shutdowns or safety problems.

There is an increased trend toward introducing modern censoring and early failure detection techniques into the design of advanced control centers in various applications such as manufacturing, navy ships, process industry and nuclear plants. The role of these computerized systems is to detect faults and degraded performances and alert the operators to anomalies in the system to help them manage the problems as quickly as possible with minimal adverse consequences. This article presents an approach to modeling periodical monitoring of a system and early detection of failures using BlockSim.

Component Reliability Importance in System Reliability Analysis

Once the reliability of a system has been determined, engineers are often faced with the task of identifying the component(s) that cause the most problems to the system in order to prioritize improvements in the design and channel resources and efforts of system improvement to the areas that will have the most impact on the system's performance. In simple systems such as a series system, it is easy to identify the weak components. In more complex systems, however, this becomes quite a difficult task. Identifying the weakest component is an exercise that is based on understanding both the reliability of each component and the roles the components play reliability-wise in the system, which is determined by their location in the reliability block diagram (RBD). For complex systems, the analyst needs a mathematical approach that will provide the means of identifying and quantifying the importance of each component in the system. (Note: the cost of improving the reliability of the component is not considered. Cost of improvement is covered in the Reliability Allocation section of the on-line Life Data Analysis Reference.) In this article, BlockSim is used to generate plots that assist in understanding the reliability importance of each component in the analyzed system.