Saptarshi Das
Research Scholar, Production Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Bijan Sarkar
Professor and Head, Production Engineering Department, Former Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Abstract
The concept of Industry 4.0 has been found as a paradigm shift for the growth and sustainable development of leading industries worldwide. It is associated with the digitalization of the manufacturing process along with real-time decision-making and enhancement of productivity improvement. A smart factory is an environment that is an aspect of Industry 4.0. This has a four-layer architecture namely the Physical layer, Network Layer, Cloud & Intelligence Layer, lastly, Terminal layer which consists of various hardware, software, and firmware. This is generally considered an intelligent production system where humans and manufacturing processes are supported by the presence of computer-based as well as other intelligent systems to achieve a seamless production for increased performance and quality of an organization. To operate such a system seamlessly, it has to be available as well as reliable enough. Otherwise, failure may occur which leads to various losses. To cope with such a situation Availability and Reliability assessment are essential task for the concern organization. By conducting such analysis, the organization can predict the real-life health of the systems and necessary preventive action might be taken to get competitive advantages and retention of the goodwill of the organization. There are many techniques are available for Reliability assessments among which Markov models are very much useful for reliability assessment in various life situations of a system. In this research work, entropy-based Markov model, which has found as a fusion process is used for Availability and Reliability evaluation of the whole system. Due to its iterative nature, precise system reliability and refined steady state availability has been achieved in this study. The fuzzy set theory has been adopted to acquire the failure data using expert elicitation for such assessment by mitigating the uncertainty therein.
Keywords- Smart Factory; Industry 4.0; Reliability and Availability Assessment; Entropy-Based Markov Model; Fuzzy Set theory.