Availability Investigation and Optimization of Crystallizer Unit of Sugar Mill Using Markov Approach and Cuckoo Search Algorithm

The prominent objective of the present study is to investigate and optimize the availability of the crystallizer unit of the sugar power plant. In the crystallizer unit all the components are connected in a series structure. The concept of redundancy at the component level has been opted. For this purpose, a stochastic model is developed using Markov birth-death process. The reliability, steady-state availability, and optimal availability are examined by considering all failure and repair time distributions as exponentially distributed. All the time-dependent random variables are statistically independent. The switch devices are perfect and a repairman is always available with the system to perform repair activities. The availability of the crystallizer unit is optimized using the cuckoo search algorithm. An effort is made to estimate the parameter's value for the prediction of the optimum availability of the crystallizer system. The numerical results are presented to highlight the importance of the study.