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IJQRM
25,8
860
Received 11 April 2007
Revised 20 November 2007
Accepted 16 December 2007 Abstract
International Journal of Quality &
Reliability Management
Vol. 25 No. 8, 2008
pp. 860-877
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0265-671X
DOI 10.1108/02656710810898667
Reliability analysis of pulping
system using Petri nets
Anish Sachdeva, Dinesh Kumar and Pradeep Kumar
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India
Purpose This paper aims to propose a methodology based on Petri nets to evaluate the reliability
characteristics of the pulping system of a paper industry in a realistic working environment. The
effects of occurrence of failure/course of actions and availability of repair facilities on system
performance have been investigated.
Design/methodology/approach Stochastic Reward Nets (SRN), an extension of Petri nets, are
applied to model the interactions among the active/standby units of the system and reliability
parameters have been evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation.
Findings The methodology adopted in this paper provides a better understanding of the behavior
of the system under varying operating conditions. Reliability analysis of a pulping system of a paper
industry presented in this paper will help the management in deciding upon the maintenance strategy
to be adopted to improve the performance of the system and consequently reduce the operation and
maintenance cost.
Originality/value The application of the proposed technique will not only help the reliability
engineers/managers/system engineers to understand the dynamic behavior of complex systems but
also helps to plan/adapt suitable maintenance policies to improve system reliability/availability.
Keywords Performance management, Reliability management, Maintenance
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In the present era of rapid technology evolution, modern technology and integrated
automation of manufacturing has developed a tendency to design and manufacture
equipments of greater capital cost, sophistication, complexity, and capacity. High
productivity and high payback ratios have become essential for the survival of these
systems. The disastrous consequences of unreliable behavior of such equipments and
systems have led to the desire for higher reliability. Therefore, such production systems
are expected to remain operative for maximum possible duration to achieve the desired
production targets. This has made the job of reliability/system analyst(s) more
challenging as they have to study, characterize, measure and analyze the behavior of the
systems. The analysis of reliability parameters (measure of reliability and availability)
helps the management to understand the effect of increasing/decreasing the repair and
failure rates of a particular component or subsystem on overall performance of the
system. In the last four decades, several research papers and books have been published
that discuss various techniques of reliability modeling in different areas of application. A
number of researchers have attempted to analyze the performance of real industrial
systems using reliability engineering principles. Cherry et al. (1978) performed reliability
analysis of a chemical industry by calculating long run availability of the plant. Dhillon
and Rayapati (1988) emphasized the need of reliability engineering principles in the
chemical industry. Singh (1989) discussed applications of reliability technology in a Reliability
biogas plant. Kumar et al. (1990a, b, 1991, 1992) analyzed the performance of sugar and analysis of
fertilizer plants. Arora and Kumar (1997, 2000) discussed stochastic analysis of paper
and thermal power plants. Gupta, Singh and Singh (2005) carried out performance pulping system
analysis of G system (7 out of 14) in spinning section of a fiber plant. Gupta, Lal, Sharma
and Singh (2005) evaluated reliability parameters of a butter manufacturing system in a
diary plant considering exponentially distributed failure rates of various components. 861
Various modeling tools namely event tree, fault trees, reliability block diagrams and
markov chains have been used to study the behavior of the system and analyze the
system reliability parameters. However most of the research work is carried out on
simplified systems by considering various assumptions.

1.1 Modeling techniques for reliability evaluation

Fault tree analysis is one of the oldest techniques used to model failure interactions in
the system. In this, the relationship between various components is represented based
on a cause and effect relationship. This method has been successfully used since 1960s,
when it was used for Reactor safety study (WASH 1400) and its effectiveness has
been proved by many practical applications. Later on, Vesley (1971) developed a
computer code KITT based on fault trees to evaluate reliability and availability of
the systems. Though fault tree proved to be very useful tool for reliability and safety
assessment of large and complex systems and provides reasonable qualitative
evaluation, it does not address the important character of many engineering systems,
which behave dynamically. The other techniques, which provide quantitative
evaluation are: reliability block diagrams and makov chains
Reliability block diagrams resemble schematic representation of systems where the
connections symbolize the interdependency and functioning of the systems. Buzacott
(1970) computed the reliability measures by successive reduction of complex models
and subsequently estimated the intervals based on parallel and series sets, which were
referred as minimal cut and path sets. Henley and Gandhi (1975) also used reliability
block diagrams to obtain reliability parameters for process industries. Though
reliability block diagrams provide useful information, they do not reveal availability or
fault characterization information. Therefore this is more useful for the electronic and
computer systems where the components need to be replaced only after their failure.
A markov chain looks at sequences of events, defined as transition between states,
and calculates the relative probability of encountering these events in both short run
and long run. A markov chain is useful for analyzing the dependent random events
that is, events whose likelihood depends upon the last state. It has been extensively
used by various researchers for evaluating the performance of systems. Cafaro et al.
(1986) explained the use of markov models in evaluating the reliability and availability
of the systems. Singh (1989)); Kumar et al. (1990a, b, 1991, 1992), Arora and Kumar
(1997; 2000), Tuteja et al. (2001), Gupta et al. (2005a, b) used the same for evaluating
performances of processing industries. Markov chain models provide accurate long
run availability and failure characterization calculations but are hard to formulate and
involve high computational efforts. It becomes rather tedious and error prone
procedure, especially when the number of states becomes very large.
The other problem associated with traditionally used modeling methods is their
limited ability in representing many of the behavioral characteristics of systems like
IJQRM complex parallelism, contention for multiple resources, resource constraint, process
25,8 dependency, preemption policies etc. These problems can be effectively dealt with the
application of Petri nets, a powerful modeling tool to represent interacting, concurrent
and synchronous components within a system. They allow to incorporate many
behavioral details of the system into the model. As a bipartite directed graph, Petri nets
help to represent the structure of the system precisely. This graphical representation
862 provides an inherently visual model to represent and understand the behavior of
complex systems easily (Jin and Sugawa, 1995).
In the last two decades, a lot of research on Petri nets and their applications was
focused on the modeling and analysis of discrete electronic systems, such as
communication protocols, computer architecture, hardware and software systems
(Desrochers and Al- Jaar, 1995; Jin and Sugawa, 1995; Baccelli et al., 1996; Balakrishnan
and Trivedi, 1996; Kim and Wu, 1996; Dutuit et al., 1997; Liu and Chiou, 1997). Petri nets
have also been extensively used and enjoy wide applications in the field of operational
research (Peterson, 1981; Haas, 2002) and flexible manufacturing systems (Yan et al., 1998;
Zhou and Venkatesh, 1999). Despite being recognized as a powerful modeling tool, the
Petri nets could not find a place in the compared techniques for system dependability (a
measure of system performance that includes reliability, availability, and safety)
(Rouvroye and Brombacher, 1999; Rouvroye and Van Den Bliek, 2002). Recently some
researchers (Rochdia et al., 1999; Knezevic and Odoom, 2001) recognized the usability of
the Petri nets for the safety analysis and found these to be more efficient than fault trees
for generating cut and path sets. The application of Petri nets in the field of reliability and
maintenance of production systems have also been addressed by few researchers (Kim
and Wu, 1996; Schneeweiss, 2001; Adamyan and He, 2002). From the literature premise it
is revealed that the Petri nets are mainly used as pre processors for constructing markov
chains. Though for small size problems markovian processes can be employed with high
speed and precision, which enables efficient parametric studies. But with the increase in
number of components in the system, the size of state space grows exponentially. This
limitation can be circumvented if some solution techniques other than markovian are
employed instead. Monte Carlo simulation provides the most obvious alternative in such
scenarios. The availability of high-speed processors has almost eliminated its major
drawback of requiring long computational times to obtain an accurate solution, especially
if rare events need to be simulated for highly dependable systems.
In the paper, reliability analysis of the pulping system of a paper industry has been
carried out using stochastic reward nets (SRN), an extension of Petri nets, in
conjunction with Monte Carlo simulation. The effects of occurrence of failures, repair
actions and availability of repair facilities on system performance have been
investigated. The next section gives a brief overview of the theory on Petri nets.

2. Petri nets
Petri Nets originated in Petris doctoral thesis Communication with automata in 1962
at University of Bonn, West Germany and were described as an abstract, formal graph
model useful for modeling and analyzing the dynamic behavior of complex systems with
concurrent discrete events (Murata, 1989). Graphically, Petri net is a bipartite directed
graph whose nodes are divided into two disjoint sets called places and transitions.
Transitions, T (drawn as boxes or bars) represent events and places, P (drawn as circles)
represent conditions for events. Directed arcs from places to transitions are called input
arcs, and those from transitions to places are called output arcs. Places may contain Reliability
tokens (drawn as small filled circles or numbers inside the place) denoting the conditions analysis of
holding at any given time. The number of arcs connecting a place to a transition (or a
transition to a place) is called the multiplicity of that input (or output) arc. When the pulping system
multiplicity of arc is more than one, a small bar with a number (equal to multiplicity) is
placed next to the arc. A transition with inhibitor arc (have small hollow circle instead of
arrow at the terminating end) cannot fire if the number of tokens that the input place of 863
the inhibitor arc contains is equal to or more tokens than the multiplicity of the arc. A
typical representation of Petri net model is shown in Figure 1.
The state of a Petri net is defined by the number of tokens contained in each place,
and is represented by a vector m #P 1 ; #P 2 ; ; #P n , called a marking,
where #P i is the number of tokens in place i and n is the number of places in the net. A
transition is enabled in the current marking if the number of tokens in each place is at
least equal to the multiplicity of the corresponding input arc. The firing of an enabled
transition is an atomic action in which tokens are removed (the number equal to
multiplicity) from the input places of the transitions and are added (the number equal to
the output places of the transitions), possibly resulting in a new marking of the Petri net.
This movement can be described by state-space equations, incident matrix or
reachability tree of the Petri Nets. A marking mj is said to be reachable from a marking
mi if, starting from mi, there exist a sequence of transitions whose firing generates mj. A
reachability graph is constructed by connecting a marking mi to a marking mj with a
directed arc if the marking mj can result from the firing of some transition enabled in mi
from the given initial marking m0, a unique reach ability graph is obtained for a Petri net.
The concept of time is not given in the original definitions of Petri nets, while for the
performance analysis of dynamic systems, it is necessary and useful to introduce time
delays associated with transitions in the Petri net models. This intuition has led to the
development of stochastic Petri nets. Stochastic Petri nets (SPN) (Florin et al., 1991) are

Figure 1.
Representation of a Petri
net model
IJQRM obtained by associating stochastic information to Petri nets. In this exponentially
25,8 distributed firing time is attached to each transition, representing the time that must
elapse from the instant that the transition is enabled until the instant it actually fires in
isolation, that is, assuming that it is not affected by firing of the other transitions. In
generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) (Marsan et al., 1994), transitions are allowed to
be either timed (exponentially distributed firing time) or immediate (zero firing time). If
864 both an immediate and a timed transition are enabled at the same instant, the
immediate transition fires first. Stochastic reward nets (SRN) (Trivedi, 1999) are based
on GSPN and allow several other features that make specifications more convenient.
Each transition may have a guard that is marking dependent. A transition can be
enabled or disabled in a marking if its guard is satisfied, in addition to the constraints
imposed by priority, input arcs, and inhibitor arcs. Marking dependent arc
multiplicities and Marking dependent firing rates are allowed, which allows the
firing rate of the transitions to be specified as a function of the current marking.

3. Modeling with Petri nets

In this section, the application of Petri nets for reliability analysis is discussed with an
illustration of two out of three systems using GSPN (Figure 2) and SRN (Figure 3)

Figure 2.
GSPN model of two out of
three systems with one
repairman
 Reliability
analysis of
pulping system

865

Figure 3.
SRN model of two out of
three unit system with one
repairman
IJQRM models. In the system each unit is considered to be perfectly repairable (as good as
25,8 new) and failure/repair rates are associated with stochastic timed transitions while
places represent the various possible states of the units and system. Figure 2, shows
the system modeled through GSPN with three different units (working on two out of
three principle) having only one repairman in the system. The firing of a transition
associated with failure event removes the token from the up condition place of that unit
866 and adds a token to the wait for repair place of the unit. If the token is present at
repairman available place, the enabled immediate transition fires and removes the
tokens from wait for repair place and repairman available place and the token moves to
under repair place. The failure of more than one unit at any time removes the token
from system up place and moves to system down place. The corresponding SRN model
for the same system is shown in Figure 3. Here the guard functions g1, g2 are employed
for enabling and disabling of associated immediate transitions. The place sys_up
contains the token when all the three units are working and each unit contain a token at
its up place. As soon as one unit out of three fails, the guard g1 enables the transition t1
and the token from place sys_up moves to place sys_red. The completion of repair of
this unit enables the transition t2 (through guard function g2) and moves the token back
to place sys_up. A further failure of any unit before repair of the first failed unit
enables the immediate transition t3(through guard function g3) and the token moves to
place sys_down. The place for sys_rel gets the token when the first system failure
occurs which gives the reliability of the system.
The up time, waiting time and repair time of the system can then be evaluated
adding a time counter represented by a test arc, a deterministic timed transitions t with
unit delay and a place collects token representing time units, as shown in Figure 4. In
the same way a place can be introduced to count the number of failures for various
units as well as system as shown in the same figure.
The reliability parameters of the system can be evaluated with simulation. The
system availability is given by the probability of a token lying in system up condition
and the unit availability is given by the probability of token lying in unit up condition,
as discussed here below:
TU up time of the unit
TW waiting time of the unit
TR repair time of the unit

Figure 4.
Counters for event time
and number of events
 T W TR total down time of the unit Reliability
T TU TW TR total time of simulation analysis of
The availability of the unit, Au TTU pulping system

4. System description
The described stochastic reward net (SRN) model has been used to study the 867
performance of the pulping system of a paper industry. The paper industry consists of
a large number of interconnected functional subsystems namely chipping, feeding,
pulping, washing, screening, bleaching, paper production, water treatment and soda
recovery arranged in a predefined network configuration. One of the important
functionary units of the paper industry is pulping system which consists of digester,
pumps, knotters, gear boxes, deckers and openers, which is the subject of discussion in
this paper and is described as follows.
The pulping system consists of various operations like cooking of chips, separation
of knots by knotter, washing of pulp by liquor and opening of fibers by infebrilizer
(opener). The wooden chips (wood composition varies with quality of paper) from
storage are fed into the digester for cooking through feeding system. After mixing with
white liquor (NaOH), cooking is done for several hours in the digester using dry and
saturated steam. The cooked pulp contains knots, which preclude the production of
paper and are removed by passing the pulp through the knotter (two in parallel). This
knot free pulp is then flowed over the large size drums (three deckers arranged in
series). The purpose of the deckers is to remove the used liquor (called black liquor)
from the pulp to the maximum extent. Then the pulp is made rolling over the surface of
the drum by using number of vacuum pumps. The speed is controlled by gear boxes.
Water at high pressure is injected to remove the black liquor from the pulp, which is
then passed through the opener (two in Parallel) rotating at high speed to separate the
fibers by combing action. Many numbers of pumps are used to pass the materials
(water and pulp) from one stage to another. The pulp so prepared with fine fibers is
then sent to the screening section for further processing. The schematic diagram of the
considered system is shown in Figure 5.
To identify the various causes that can induce failure in the pulping system, a root
cause analysis of the system is carried out (Figure 6). Based on the failure causes the
maintenance data from the log books of a paper industry, producing 200 tonnes of
paper per day, has been used to compute the failure and repair rates of the major
subsystems. The mean failure and repair rates of various units thus obtained are given
in Table I.

5. System modeling
The detailed arrangement of subsystems of pulping system is given as follows:
.
There is one digester whose failure causes complete failure of the system.
.
There are two knotters. The system failure occurs only if both the units fail, but
the failure of one unit results in reduced capacity of the system.
.
There is three stage washing system. A washing system consists of three units
namely, two pumps (one in standby), one gear box and a decker. The washing
system works on two out of three systems success criteria i.e. the system failure
IJQRM
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Figure 5.
Flow diagram of pulping
system

occurs when more than one washing system fails. However, low grade pulp is
produced with two stage washing system and is used for the production of low
quality paper.
.
There are two openers and the system failure occurs only when both the units
fail, but the failure of one unit results in reduced capacity of the system.
.
There are two pumps (one in standby) at each stage to move the pulp to the next
stage.
 Reliability
analysis of
pulping system

869

Figure 6.
Root cause analysis

Name of the unit Failure rate (per hr) Repair rate (per hr)
23
Digester 2 10 6 102 2
Knotter 1 102 2 2 102 1
Opener 1.5 102 2 2 102 1
Decker 4.6 102 3 3 102 1 Table I.
Gear box 1 102 3 4 102 1 Subsystem failure and
Pumps 4 102 3 5 102 1 repair rates

In the analysis it is assumed that:

.
Repair and failure rates are statistically independent.
.
Repair is perfect (repaired unit is as good as new).
.
Nature and capacity of the standby units are same as active units.
.
Switchover time from active to standby units and vice versa is negligible.
.
No delay in repair except the availability of repairmen is considered.
.
Repair priority is based on first come first serve (FCFS).

The Petri net model of the pulping system has been developed and shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7(a) represents the places for working, waiting for repair and repair states of the
various units of the pulping system. The number of tokens at the place for repair
facilities indicates the number of repairmen available in the system. The plants
working in reduced capacity (Pred_cap) and full capacity (Pfull_cap) are shown in
Figure 7(b). Figure 7(c) indicates the systems working in degraded state. The place
Pdeck_work, Pdeck_red, Pdeck_fail represents the functioning of all the three deckers in
working state, two out of three working (low grade pulp) and system failure due to
failure of two deckers, respectively. The places Psys_up, Psys_dn and Psys_rel signify the
availability, unavailability and reliability of the system, respectively in Figure 7(d).
IJQRM
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870

Figure 7.
Petri net model of the
pulping system

6. Performance analysis
The reliability parameters of the system are evaluated with Monte Carlo simulation of
the Petri net model using SPNP (Trivedi, 1999). Batch simulation is used for evaluating
the parameters in steady state i.e. for evaluating system availability, working in the
reduced capacity state and degraded quality state. The simulation was run for 10,000
replications for a period of five years at 95 percent confidence level. Simulation with
independent replications is used for evaluating Reliability of the system.
These performance parameters have been evaluated for various value combinations
of repair and failure rates to analyze the dynamic behavior of the system. The possible
value combinations of failure and repair rates of the subsystems (Table II) have been
decided in consultation with maintenance engineers of the plant. The effect of
availability of repairmen on these parameters is also investigated. The results thus
obtained are presented here below (Figure 8) and discussed thereafter.
Figure 8 (a1) shows that a significant impact is observed on the availability of the
system with the variation in failure and repair rates of the digester. An increase in
 Reliability
Effect of variation on
Variation in Systems state in Systems state in analysis of
failure rates System degraded quality reduced capacity pulping system
Unit/subsystem (repair rates) availability (percentage of time) (percentage of time)

Digester 0.001 0.003 0.9754 0.9455 4.97 4.85 21.12 20.48

(0.04 0.08) (0.9444 0.9680) (4.81 4.95) (20.46 21.02) 871
Knotter 0.008 0.012 0.9611 0.9594 4.90 4.89 19.27 22.13
(0.12 0.27) (0.9565 0.9614) (4.88 4.91) (24.94 18.87)
Opener 0.01 0.02 0.9632 0.9578 4.85 4.92 17.10 24.28
(0.1 0.3) (0.9483 0.9628) (4.80 4.93) (30.38 17.13)
Decker 0.003 0.005 0.9610 0.9601 3.52 5.21 20.80 20.76
(0.2 0.4) (0.9594 0.9607) (6.78 3.84) (20.77 20.80)
Table II.
Gear box 0.008 0.012 0.9607 0.9605 4.75 5.03 20.82 20.77
Effect of variation in
(0.3 0.5) (0.9602 0.9610) (5.14 4.77) (20.78 20.81)
failure (repair) rates of
Pumps 0.002 0.006 0.9614 0.9606 4.95 4.87 20.81 20.73 subsystems on system
(0.3 0.6) (0.9605 0.9614) (4.86 4.93) (20.71 20.83) performance

failure rate of digester from 0.001 to 0.003 and the reduction in repair rates of the same
from 0.08 to 0.04 reduce the system availability up to 5 percent. However the same
variations in failure and repair rates of the digester marginally affect the systems
working in state of degraded quality (Figure 8 (b1)), but systems working in reduced
capacity is moderately affected (Figure 8 (c1)).
The variation in failure (0.008 to 0.012) and repair rates (0.12 to 0.27) of the knotter
have negligible effect on system availability (Figure 8 (a2)) and degraded state of
system (Figure 8 (b2)). But the systems working in state of reduced capacity (due to
working of only one knotter) become as high as 27 percent for failure rate (0.012) and
repair rate (0.12) of knotter (Figure 8 (c2)). Similar is the case of opener. The systems
working in reduced capacity varies from 19.7 percent to 36.1 percent for the
corresponding variation in failure rates (0.010 to 0.020) and repair rates (0.1 to 0.3)
(Figure 8 (c3)). The systems working in degraded state remains steady for this
variation (Figure 8 (b3)). However considerable impact is observed on system
availability (Figure 8 (a3)).
As shown in Figure 8 (a4), the effect of failure (0.003 to 0.005) and repair rates (0.2 to
0.4) of deckers on system availability is insignificant. This is due to the fact that
working of two deckers out of three keeps the system working. But these results in
high percentage of low quality pulp which varies from 2.85 per cent to 7.35 percent for
the considered range of failure and repair rates of deckers (Figure 8 (b4)). However for
this range the systems working in reduced capacity remains almost uniform (Figure 8
(c4)).
The variations in failure (0.0008 to 0.0012) and repair rates (0.3 to 0.5) of gear box
have little impact on the system availability (Figure 8 (a5)) and systems working in
reduced state (Figure 8 (b5)). However there is a slight effect on the systems working in
degraded state, which varies from 4.7 to 5.3 percent (Figure 8 (c5)). Since the pumps are
working with standby at every stage in the system, the performance parameters are
not affected at all by the variation in failure (0.002 to 0.006) and repair rates (0.3 to 0.6)
IJQRM
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872

Figure 8.
Effect of failure and
repairs rates on
availability (ai); degraded
quality (bi); reduced
capacity (ci)
 Reliability
analysis of
pulping system

873

Figure 8.

of the pumps, as shown in Figure 8 (a6, b6, c6). The magnitude of effect of variation in
failure and repair rates (shown in between brackets) of various subsystems of the
pulping system on its performance is summarized in Table II.
The Figure 9 shows the effect of number of repair facilities on system performance.
The performance parameters got stabilized when there are four repairmen in the
system, which leads to the conclusion that three independent repair facilities need to be
created to achieve the maximum performance of the system.
The reliability of the system is evaluated from the probability of a token not lying at
place PSys_rel in the Petri net model and is shown in Figure 10.

6. Conclusion
The reliability management of complex industrial systems is highly difficult for
reliability analysts due to difficulties in modeling and evaluating the performance of
the system, especially during strategic maintenance planning. Though rigorous efforts
have been made by researchers to evolve methods to study the effect of subsystem
conditions and maintenance policies on system performance, these methods involve
complex computations and the computations grow tremendously with further growth
in number of subsystems. A technique based on modeling and simulation of such
complex systems with stochastic reward nets is presented as a tool for assessing and

Figure 9.
Effect of failure and repair
rates of digester on (a)
system availability; (b)
systems state of degraded
quality; (c) systems state
of reduced capacity
IJQRM
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874

Figure 10.
Reliability of the system

evaluating system reliability parameters. The what if analysis with the proposed
methodology will help to understand how the maintenance resources, policies and
subsystem conditions affect the performance of the system. The methodology can be
applied to a wide range of industrial plants, helping the reliability engineers to gain
information, evaluate and implement maintenance strategies.
The performance analysis of pulping system of a paper industry can help in
increasing the production and quality of paper. Detailed study reveals that the digester
is critical part of the system and needs utmost care of the management. The analysis of
systems working in reduced capacity and degraded quality will facilitate the
management in deciding the product mix. The analysis of repairmen availability on
system performance will help in deciding the resource allocation. Thus, the concerned
managers can plan and adapt suitable maintenance practices/strategies for improving
the system performance and there by reduce the operation and maintenance (O&M)
costs. Apart from these advantages the system performance analysis may help to
conduct cost-benefit analysis, operational capability studies, inventory and spare parts
management and replacement decisions.

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Further reading
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About the authors

Anish Sachdeva obtained his bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering from National Institute
of Technology (Erstwhile, Regional Engineering College), Jalandhar, India in year 1994.
Subsequently, he obtained his masters in Industrial Engineering from Punjab Technical
University, Jalandhar. He is presently working as Lecturer in Industrial Engineering
Department, National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar, Punjab, India and pursuing PhD
degree in Mechanical and Industrial engineering Department at Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT), Roorkee, India. His areas of interest are reliability and maintenance engineering, industrial
management, modeling and simulation. Anish Sachdeva is the corresponding author and can be
contacted at: anishsachdeva@gmail.com
 Dinesh Kumar is Professor in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, IIT Reliability
Roorkee, India. He obtained his BSc Engineering with Hons. (Mechanical engineering) in 1980
from Punjab University and Masters in Mechanical Engineering from University of Roorkee in analysis of
1984. He received PhD degree in 1991 in Mechanical Engineering from University of Roorkee, pulping system
India. He has about 26 years research/teaching and industrial experience and 100 publications in
international/national journals/conferences. He has guided number of students for their
undergraduate projects, masters dissertations and PhD degrees. His fields of interests are
industrial engineering, modeling and simulation, maintenance and reliability engineering. 877
Pradeep Kumar is Professor in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, IIT
Roorkee, India. He has obtained his bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering in 1982 from
Roorkee University and masters in Production Engineering from University of Roorkee in 1989.
He received PhD degree in 1994 in mechanical engineering with specialization in Industrial
engineering from University of Roorkee, India. He has about 21 years research/teaching
experience. He has guided number of students for their undergraduate projects, master
dissertations and PhD degrees. He has contributed 250 publications in international/national
journals/conferences of repute. His fields of interests are advanced manufacturing processes,
metal casting, quality and reliability engineering.

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