Research Article

Consecutive failure analysis using novel algorithms in sequence determination of petri nets firing

^*1Imaekhai Lawrence and ²Diamond Blessing

¹Department of Materials and Production Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State, Nigeria

²Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal Polytechnic, Auchi, Edo State, Nigeria

*Corresponding Author E-mail: oboscos@gmail.com

Accepted 16 November 2013

Abstract

Failure occurrence in industrial systems can be a result of a sequence of failures leading to a total system failure. Up to now, several methods to determine failure sequences and to calculate probability of such failures have been proposed. These methods primarily focus on modeling aspects of the problem and do not present a certain framework to determine potential failure sequences. In this paper, a novel approach based on Petri net modeling of the systems is proposed and several heuristic algorithms are developed. Determination of potential failures in sample industrial problems and comparing the results with other existing methods demonstrates that the presented algorithms are much more efficient in dealing with complex Petri net models while existing methods are not capable of handling such complicated models.

Keywords: Algorithms, Modeling, Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Sequence, Dynamism