Fault Tree Analysis for Reliability Evaluation of an Advanced Complex Manufacturing System

Abstract

In this paper, minimal paths and cuts technique is developed to handle fault tree analysis (FTA) on the critical components of industrial robots. This analysis is integrated with the reliability block diagram (RBD) approach in order to investigate the robot system reliability. The model is implemented in a complex advanced manufacturing system having autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) as material handling devices. FTA grants cause and effects and hierarchical properties to the model. On the other hand, RBD simplifies the complex system of the AGVs for reliability evaluation. The results show that due to the filtering of the paths in a manufacturing system for AGVs, the reliability is highly dependent on the mostly occupied paths by AGVs. The failure probability for the AGV is considered to follow the exponential probability distribution and thus the whole system reliability using minimal paths and cuts method is obtained 0.8741.