Cost minimization of butter-oil processing plant using artificial bee colony technique

For achieving the goal of high production and hence more profit in an organization, the system reliability is an important issue, i.e. each system/subsystem must remain operative for long duration. The industrial systems are complex in configuration so it is very difficult to analyze their failure pattern. The available information about these equipments is imprecise, incomplete, vague and conflicting. Therefore, management decisions are based on experience. The objective of this paper is to improve the design efficiency and to find the optimal policy for mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR) and related costs. This paper presents an application of Artificial Bees’ Colony (ABC) in order to solve a series-parallel system (here, butter-oil processing plant) availability allocation problem. In addition to maximization of system availability, the decision maker also oftenly requires that the cost of the system is minimized simultaneously. So the objective is to obtain a minimum cost configuration of the system that satisfies the given availability constraints. ABC algorithm has been used for computing the optimal design parameters at which system cost is minimized and results are shown to be statistically significant by means of pooled t-test with PSO results.