Reliability Evaluation and Decision Support System of a Pharmaceutical Plant

The paper proposes a method to compute the reliability of a pharmaceutical plant. A decision support system for the concerned plant was also developed. The pharmaceutical plant mainly consists of nine subsystems working in a series. One subsystem, namely, the Rotary Compression Machine was supported by standby units with perfect switch over device. The remaining eight subsystems were prone to failure. Mathematical model of pharmaceutical plant was developed using Markov birth-death process. The differential equations were developed on the basis of probabilistic approach using transition diagram which were further solved using the matrix method. A program was developed in C language to study the variation of reliability with respect to time. Steady-state availability of the concerned plant was also calculated in order to develop the decision matrices which provide various availability levels for different combinations to failure/repair rates of different subsystems. This enables the management to quantitatively analyze all the factors, viz., maintenance strategies and states of nature, which influence the maintenance decisions associated with the pharmaceutical plant. The findings of this paper would be highly beneficial to the plant management for the corrective and timely execution of proper maintenance decisions and hence enhance the performance of the system