Design for reliability of complex system: Case study of horizontal drilling equipment with limited failure data

Abstract

Reliability is an important phase in durable system designs, specifically in the early phase of the product development. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed for complex systems' design for reliability. Specific test and field failure data scarcity is evaluated here as a challenge to implement design for reliability of a new product. In the developed approach, modeling and simulation of the system are accomplished by using reliability block diagram (RBD) method.The generic data are corrected to account for the design and environment effects on the application. The integral methodology evaluates reliability of the system and assesses the importance of each component. In addition, the availability of the system was evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation. Available design alternatives with different components are analyzed for reliability optimization. Evaluating reliability of complex systems in competitive design attempts is one of the applications of this method. The advantage of this method is that it is applicable in early design phase where there is only limited failure data available. As a case study, horizontal drilling equipment is used for assessment of the proposed method. Benchmarking of the results with a system with more available failure and maintenance data verifies the effectiveness and performance quality of presented method.