Reliability Block Diagram analysis of a computer System ABSTRACT: This report deals with possibility of simulation of reliability block

diagrams as a time dependent analysis using BlockSim software. INTRODUCTION

In today's competitive environment, corporations and customers are increasingly becoming aware about the performance of the products .There is a need to know the life time characteristics viz mean time to failure, mean time to repair, availability etc. of a product so that accordingly product support system can be brought up for the best service to customers while maintaining a reasonable profit margin. In this report, a computer assembly has been considered. An attempt has been made to analyse its reliability and other related characteristics using block diagram approach. The software used is a trial version of BlockSim.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVE The main objective of system reliability is the construction of a model that represents mean time to failure of the entire system based on the failure time distributions of the systems elements. These elements can be components assemblies, sub-systems etc. There are many specific reasons for looking at component data to estimate the overall system reliability. One of the most important is that in many situations it is easier and less expensive to test single elements rather than entire systems, also properties of failure distributions of single elements can be easily tuned and then changes of overall system distribution can be compared.

METHODOLOGY Two basic approaches exist: Static analytical calculations and Time-dependent calculations Systems can contain static blocks, time-dependent blocks or a mixture of the two. Static analytical calculations are performed on Reliability Block Diagram, RBD. A static block can be interpreted either as a block with a reliability value that is known only at a given time (but the block's entire distribution is unknown). Static calculations can only be performed in the analytical mode and not in the simulation calculations.

Time-dependent analysis looks at reliability as a function of time. That is, a known failure distribution is assigned to each component. The time scale can be any quantifiable time measure, such as years, months, hours, minutes or seconds. If one includes information on the repair and maintenance characteristics of the components and resources available in the system, other information can also be analyzed/obtained, such as i.e. system availability, maintainability etc. In this case, time dependent analysis of reliability has been considered. The computer assembly has been analysed and broken down into major components that go into its making. The computer is thought of as a series combination of three major units that are input unit, processing unit and output unit. Failure of any of these units can easily cause the entire system to go down. INPUT UNIT: The major inputs are power supply system, keyboard and mouse. Without power supply, system is always down. So, it is separately taken in series with another unit consisting of keyboard and mouse in parallel. If keyboard and mouse go down together, it can significantly hamper the functioning of computer leading to the system going down. Failure of either of these would not cause system failure as using mouse on-screen keyboard can be activated and keyboard has inbuilt features of a mouse. The possibility of touch-screen system has been excluded. PROCESSING UNIT: The processing unit has been considered as a series combination of RAM and CPU. Failure of either of these effectively result in system downtime. Hence, these have been taken in a series configuration.CPU has been taken as a single block. It is assumed to include all other essential components like drives, ports etc. OUTPUT UNIT: Monitor has been taken as an output unit. It is in series with the rest of units as its failure causes the system to go down. PROBLEM STATEMENT: The problem can be stated as that of doing reliability, availability and maintainability analysis of the block diagram as shown below:

Figure 0: block diagram representation of computer assembly.

In absence of availability of actual data, experience has been relied upon. As these are electronic items, it is safe to assume their failure time distribution to be exponentially distributed or Weibull with shape parameter, The scale parameter has been assumed on the basis of experience.The assumed data for each block is as shown below:

Table: Components characteristics and costs

Components CPU 1 Ram 1 Mouse 1 Keyboard 1 Monitor 1 Computer Power Supply 1 System

(hours) 30000 20000 20000 20000 30000

REPAIR/REPLACEMENT TIME SELLING DISTRIBUTION (NORMAL) PRICE MEAN ST. DEV. (Rs) 3 .5 6000 3 .5 880 2 .5 100 2 .5 200 7 1.5 5000 5 1

20000

1200

INTRODUCTION TO BlockSim BlockSim is a user friendly software with various modules. It can be easily used for the analysis of reliability block diagrams and fault trees. The software tool provides a comprehensive platform for system reliability, availability, maintainability and related analyses. The software offers a sophisticated graphical interface that allows to model the simplest or most complex systems or processes using reliability block diagrams (RBDs) or fault tree analysis (FTA), or a combination of both.

Figures (Nos. 1,2,3 and 4) shown below are the snaps of the software interface while performing various steps during simulation. Once the block diagram is constructed, properties are assigned to each block. They are shown in the figures

Figure 1: The interface shows general information regarding a block .

Figure 2: the interface shows time to failure distribution input method

Figure 3: the interface shows time to repair distribution input

Figure 4: the interface shows input method of other properties for each block like maximum possible reliability etc.

Assumptions for Simulation The following sections present the underlying assumptions for BlockSims simulation routine. A block will always be down when a corrective maintenance action is performed. Downing events cannot overlap. Non-downing events can overlap with downing events. If corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance and inspection are scheduled to occur at the same time for a block, the preventive maintenance and inspection will take priority over the corrective maintenance. If preventive maintenance and an inspection are scheduled to occur at the same time for a block, the inspection will take priority over the preventive maintenance action. If a failure or preventive maintenance occurs during a non-downing inspection, and the corrective maintenance or preventive maintenance has a restoration factor, and the inspection action has a restoration factor, then both restoration factors are used (compounded). If preventive maintenance occurs after an inspection based on the failure detect threshold, the restoration is compounded. If a failure and a preventive maintenance action occur simultaneously and both bring the system down and have the same uptime, the system downing is attributed to the corrective maintenance action. if two consecutive corrective maintenance actions bring the system down, this will only count for one system downing event. A system failure does not necessarily have a downtime.

TABLE 2: SYSTEM SUMMARY

TABLE 3: BLOCKS SUMMARY

where MTTF stands for mean time to failure. CM stands for corrective maintenance. RSFCI stands for Reliasoft failure criticality index RSDECI stands for Reliasoft downing event criticality analysis. NOF stands for number of failures. SD stands for system down. A(t) is availability at time t. R(t) is reliability at time t. Difficulties Faced y Above mentioned analysis is done by a BlockSim trial version, which is unable to save the changes. y When simulation is to be done for a number of intervals, in this situation for each iteration details has to noted down otherwise lost. so this software is able to adapt some changes so that it may give a consolidated detail for a number of iteration. y The computer assembly could not be exactly configured as a combination of series and parallel configuration y Actual data were not available that's why a lot of subjectivity had to e involved References y
y y y y y y y y y y

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