Mathematical modeling and availability analysis for complex systems of a sugar plant using genetic algorithm

Abstract

Sugar, paper, leather, glass, fertilizer, textile, chemical, and oil refinery etc are the various process industry needs attention of the researchers to leverage the production to meet the demands of the nations. Enhancement of productivity in sugar industry required complicated equipments and complex system (like feeding, evaporation, refining, crushing, crystallization system) and the continuous operation of the system in working state has great significance for the high efficiency and production of sugar in a plant. It is hard to accomplish high productivity with few standby units, losses in production, and low repair costs. Several concepts of industrial engineering and operational research are used to achieve high system effectiveness in terms of availability and reliability. A wide-ranging review of the literature was undertaken in the area of availability, decision making and availability optimization in various process industries. The examination showed that less work has been conceded in the quantitative analysis of the real system. An effort has been made by this research to fill this gap through the present work. The work has been conducted in Shahabad Markanda sugar plants situated in the districts of Yamuna Nagar, Kurukshetra, Haryana (North India). In the current work, the mathematical models of different working components (feeding, refining and crystallization unit) of sugar plant have been developed and their performance has also been analyzed. For this purpose simple probabilistic approach and Markov birth-death process have been used. The differential equations associated with the various units have been developed. The equations reduced to steady state conditions and solved. It shows the interrelation for various working units of the plant. The state of character and obvious courses of action of various working units namely feeding, refining and crystallization etc. has been recorded for determining their performance level. The relative importance of each subsystem in a unit has been analyzed a