Content area
Full Text
Introduction
The paper manufacturing plant (PMP) is pivotal for making essential products for communication, education, and packaging. In the beginning, the paper industry depends on slow, time-consuming, and labor-intensive procedures. Now advanced high-speed machines and capital-intensive equipment have significantly increased production efficiency and output. The paper industry entails a combination of complex sub-processes and large systems managed in various configurations such as series, parallel, or hybrid. The paper manufacturing process includes two main steps: transforming fibrous raw materials into pulp and then converting the pulp into paper. These two key steps are performed with the help of various subsystems. Paper mills unite multiple process areas including wood preparation, pulping, chipping, cooking, washing, bleaching, screening, stock preparation, and paper production. The main subsystems of paper plants are feeding, pulping, washing, bleaching, screening, and paper formation.
In modern manufacturing, technological developments and mechanization have increased the complexity of paper manufacturing plants and it subsequently influences the operational performance of the plant. Reliability measures like reliability, maintainability, and availability are key metrics to assess the performance of any plant. It is always anticipated that highly available systems will perform better. So, researchers always try to develop efficient methodologies to ensure the high availability/reliability of the plants. Kumar et al. [1] discussed the pulping system in the paper industry configured using four subsystems in series redundancy having constant failure and repair rates. Sachdeva et al. [2] proposed a Petri net-based methodology to estimate the reliability of a paper industry’’s pulping system in a realistic environment and investigated the impact of failures, actions, and repair facility availability on system performance. Sachdeva et al. [3] proposed a methodology based on Petri nets to evaluate the availability parameters of a screening system in the paper industry and the effects of failures and repairs on the system performance have also been investigated. Sachdeva et al. [4] evaluated the performance and availability of the feeding system in a sugar plant, which is a complex engineering system having several units. Khanduja et al. [5] developed a stochastic model for the performance investigation of a paper plant’’s screening unit using a genetic algorithm.
Tsarouhas and Besseris [6] developed a methodology based on TTR data to conduct the maintainability analysis in the shaving blades industry. Pandey et...