Evidence for self-organized criticality in unscheduled downtime data of equipment

Abstract

How to reduce downtime and improve availability of the complex equipment is very important. Although the unscheduled downtime(USDT) issues of the equipment are very complex, the self-organized criticality(SOC) is the right theory to study complex systems evolution and opens up a new window to the investigation of disasters, such as the sudden failure of the equipment. Firstly,SOC theory and its validation method are introduced. Then an SOC validation method for USDT of the equipment is proposed based on the above theory. Case study is done on bottleneck equipment in a factory and corresponding data pre-process work is done. The rescaled-range(R/S) analysis method is used to calculate the Hurst exponent of USDT time-series data in order to determine the long-range correlation of USDT data on time scale;at the same time the spatial power-law characteristic of USDT time series data is studied. The result shows that the characteristics of SOC are revealed in USDT data of the equipment according to the criterion of SOC. In addition, based on the characteristics of SOC,the overall framework of the prediction method for major sudden failure of the equipment is proposed based on SOC.