Reliability, availability and maintainability analysis in food production lines: a review

Abstract

Summary The scope of this study is to review reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) analysis in the food industry and aims to identify the critical points of the production systems that should be improved by the operational performance and the maintenance effectiveness. RAM is an engineering tool that addresses operations and safety issues of production lines and aims to identify areas within the system or process where significant improvement can be achieved. Food production lines consist of several machines supplied with a common transfer mechanism and control system that have different failure modes. When a random failure occurs, the failed machine stops and forces most of the line upstream of the failure to operate without processing, whereas the material (raw, intermediate or end‐product) of the line downstream may have to be scrapped because of quality deterioration during the stoppage. The negative failure impact is the drop of line reliability and production rate.

Assessment methods of production processes reliability – state of the art

“…Assessment problems in this field have gained much interest since 1960s [11]. A summary of literature in the examined research area can be found, for example, in [49], where the author focused on the issues of assessing the reliability of the production systems, or in the works [27,28,55], where the literature on the use of RAM analysis methods (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability) in the area of production systems performance is investigated. Surveys among international managers of manufacturing companies in the area of evaluation which reliability analysis methods are applied in their organizations were presented, among others, in [18].…”

“…Podsumowanie literatury w badanym obszarze można znaleźć między innymi w pracy [49], gdzie autor skupił się na zagadnieniu oceny nieuszkadzalności systemów produkcyjnych, czy w pracach [27,28,55], gdzie skupiono się na przeglądzie literatury z obszaru zastosowania metod analizy RAM (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability) w obszarze funkcjonowania systemów produkcyjnych. Badania ankietowe wśród managerów międzynarodowych przedsiębiorstw produkcyjnych w zakresie oceny, które metody analizy niezawodnościowej są stosowane w danych organizacjach, zostały przedstawione m.in.…”

Yogurt production line: reliability analysis

“…Reliability and availability are appropriate approaches for measuring product quality, product performance, and cost effectiveness of the product itself (Goetz & Villa, 1998). Tsarouhas (2012) reviewed reliability, availability, and maintainability analysis in the food industries, and identified the critical points of the production systems that should improve the operational performance and the maintenance effectiveness. Hajeeh and Chaudhuri (2000) worked on reliability and availability assessment of reverse osmosis by analyzing its failure behavior and downtime patterns.…”

Case‐based decision support for fault diagnosis: Do salient ratings discourage situation analysis?

“…The processing industry is concerned with the mass production and packaging of consumer goods such as biscuits, yogurt, or juice. However, the operation of processing machines is characterized by frequent faults and malfunctions (Schult, Beck, & Majschak, ; Tsarouhas, ). Diagnosing and managing these faults is difficult for at least two reasons.…”

“…However, the operation of processing machines is characterized by frequent faults and malfunctions (Schult, Beck, & Majschak, 2015;Tsarouhas, 2012). Diagnosing and managing these faults is difficult for at least two reasons.…”