Title: Threshold switch over policy for multi-component machining system with controllable rates

Authors: Madhu Jain; Varsha Rani; Rekha Kumari

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, India ' Department of Mathematics, St. John's College, Agra, 282002, India ' Department of Mathematics, I.B.S., Khandari, Agra, 282002, India

Abstract: This paper deals with the analysis of a multi-component machine repair problem (MRP) consisting of operating units along with mixed (cold and warm) standbys. The Markovian queuing problem has been modelled by considering the queue of failed units to be interdependent. The failure and repair rates are assumed to be controllable. In case of heavy workload, a threshold policy is suggested to turn on the removable additional repairmen. The product type technique has been used to obtain steady state probabilities. Various performance measures such as expected number of failed units in the system, expected waiting time, throughput, delay time, etc. are obtained in terms of probabilities. A programme is encoded in MATLAB software to analyse the sensitivity of the queue length for various system parameters. Further, these results are compared with the results obtained by employing the neuro-fuzzy approach. Numerical results are facilitated to examine the practicability of the model, under consideration with the help of an illustration.

Keywords: correlated queues; threshold policy; steady state analysis; machine repair; mixed standbys; controllable rates; queue size; neuro-fuzzy; neural networks; fuzzy logic; multi-component machining; modelling; failed units; waiting time; throughput; delay time; probabilities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2015.070180

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2015 Vol.20 No.4, pp.397 - 414

Received: 24 Jul 2013
Accepted: 14 Dec 2013
Published online: 29 Jun 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article