RELIABILITY-ANALYSIS OF A POWERLOOM PLANT WITH COLD STANDBY FOR ITS STRATEGIC UNIT

A powerloom plant consists of two units A and B(n) connected in series . Unit B(n) has n components in parallel redundancy that carry threads of different varieties/colours to unit A. Unit A is the strategic uni t that weaves these threads together and produces a long piece of clot h of some standard size. Failure of unit A makes the entire system fai l whereas the failure of k components out of n in unit B(n) results in the system working in a degraded state. The present paper deals with the reliability analysis of the powerloom plant with a cold standby fo r its strategic unit. The common cause failure and critical human erro rs have also been considered to avoid overestimation of the reliabilit y of the system. Results of Dhillon [Int. J. syst. Sci. 23, 1277-1287 (1992)] have been deduced as a particular case of our result.