Copula Approach for Reliability and Performance Estimation of Manufacturing System

This study focuses on an investigation into the analysis of reliability measures used to determine the strength of a serial manufacturing system comprising of three subsystems A, B, and C in the form of units, conveyors, and processors. Subsystem A has three parallel active units, whereas subsystems B and C each have two units. The system is analyzed using the linear differential difference equation, supplementary variable technique and Gumbel-Hougaard family of copula to obtain expressions of reliability measures for determining system strength such as availability, reliability, mean time to failure (MTTF), and profit function. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the obtained results and analyze the effects of various system parameters. The current study may assist manufacturing, industries, reliability engineers, maintenance managers, system designers and their repairers in alleviating some of the challenges faced by repairers in certain manufacturing and industrial systems operating in harsh environments or under unfavorable weather conditions.