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Computing availability for redundant flow systems

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Abstract

There are many papers in the literature about computing reliability for binary redundant systems. However in the real world there are many systems, whose economics depend on average availability of flow throughout the life span of the system rather than reliability on one particular threshold level only. Such systems exist in oil and gas redundant flow networks. To best of this author’s knowledge no attempt has been made yet to compute availability of such systems. Computing availability of flow is of utmost importance for the economical planning and design of any industrial flow networks. In this paper an approach is proposed to compute availability of flow in redundant flow systems. The proposed approach is compared with the approach used in the weighted \(k\)-out-of-\(n\) systems for computing reliability. The results show the better performance of the proposed approach in terms of computational time if the system bears heavier weights. Furthermore proposed scheme has additional advantage of being capable of handling fractional weights.

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Acknowledgments

It is gratefully acknowledged that Professor Michael Todinov has arranged financial help from Leverhulme Trust for this piece of research with the research grant F/00 382/J ‘High-speed algorithms for the output flow in repairable flow networks’. It is further acknowledged that Dr. Peter Ball has provided his useful extensive reviews for this paper. I would also like to thank Dr Gareth Neighbour for the support he has given in the process of publishing this paper. Finally contribution of reviewer of this paper is acknowledged as he suggested Binary Representation Method (BRM) for comparisons that made this paper more plausible.

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  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Design, Technology and Environment, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    Ziauddin Ursani

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  1. Ziauddin Ursani
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Correspondence to Ziauddin Ursani.

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Ursani, Z. Computing availability for redundant flow systems. Optim Lett 8, 715–725 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-013-0611-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-013-0611-z

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