Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management, Twelfth Edition
by Jay Heizer, Barry Render, Chuck Munson
Reliability
Systems are composed of a series of individual interrelated components, each performing a specific job. If any one component fails to perform, for whatever reason, the overall system (for example, an airplane or machine) can fail. First, we discuss system reliability and then improvement via redundancy.
System Reliability
Because failures do occur in the real world, understanding their occurrence is an important reliability concept. We now examine the impact of failure in a series. Figure 17.2 shows that as the number of components in a series increases, the reliability of the whole system declines very quickly. A system of n = 50 interacting parts, each of which has a 99.5% reliability, has an overall reliability of 78%. If the system ...
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