Reliability Analysis of an Engine Assembly Process of Automobiles with Inspection Facility

Abstract

Present paper studies the reliability analysis of an engine assembly system incorporating inspection facility. The engine system consists of nine main units namely: Cylinder block, Crank shaft, Oil sump, Piston, Cylinder head gasket, Cam shaft gear, Crank shaft gear, Fuel injection pump and High pressure line. The whole system can fail due to failure of any of the units. It is also assumed that the system can fail due to catastrophic failure. The system satisfies the usual conditions like perfect repair, random variables, joint distributions etc. Each operative unit has a constant failure rate but a general repair time distribution. We transform the basic equation into integro differential equation and outline the solution procedure for a repair time distribution with an arbitrary rational Laplace transform. Various reliability characteristics such as transition state probabilities, steady state behavior, availability, reliability, MTTF and cost analysis have been obtained using a time dependent version of the supplementary variable method and Gumble-Hougaard copula methodology. Some particular cases and asymptotic behaviour of the system have also been derived to improve practical importance of the model.

Keywords: Supplementary variable technique, reliability, MTTF, asymptotic behaviour, Markov process.