Reliability and maintainability analysis of strudel production line with experimental data - A case study

The strudel production line consists of several workstations and machines in series supplied with a common transfer mechanism and control system that have different failure modes. When a random failure occurs, the failed machine stops and forces most of the line upstream of the failure to operate without processing whereas the material (raw, intermediate or end-product) of the line downstream may have to be scrapped due to quality deterioration during the stoppage. The failure impact is the drop of line reliability and production rate. A reliability and maintainability analysis of strudel production line at machine, workstation and entire line level was developed. Descriptive statistics of the failure and repair data was carried out and the best fitness index parameters were determined. Data collection from production line and their analysis were valid for a period of sixteen months. Furthermore, the reliability and hazard rate modes for all workstations and the entire production line were calculated. The proposed models could be a useful tool towards (a) assessing the current conditions, and (b) predicting reliability for improving the production line maintenance policy. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved