Reliability and availability of industrial bakery plant: Modeling and analysis. A case study

In this paper the modeling of an industrial bakery plant aimed at evaluating its Reliability and Availability is described. In order to individuate the production capabilities and the weak points of an complex high-tech food production plant, the authors obtained the prediction of the reliability of the production line by considering sub-systems and apparatus. In this context a complex Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) of the production site has been built from components and from operative steps. The analysis is aimed at providing a strategy for the implementation and improvement of the design and the machineries arrangement. This allows for optimizing the operation of the production lines and for setting appropriate priorities for the development of activities that have the largest impact on cost efficiency. The production phases, the machines performance and the system capacity of the bakery plant are studied by means of the availability prediction (current and historical) based on the experimental data of the production behavior (operating, faulty, standby).