ORIGINAL ARTICLE Stochastic behaviour analysis of real industrial system Dilbagh Panchal 1 • Dinesh Kumar 2 Received: 30 March 2016 / Revised: 10 January 2017 Ó The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden 2017 Abstract This research work seeks to propose qualitative and quantitative approaches based integrated framework for studying the behavior of a real industrial system. Under quantitative analysis, the series/parallel arrangement of the considered system is represented by Petri-Net approach. Various reliability parameters of the system were com- puted at different spread and the system failure behavior is studied under uncertainty. Further, for improving system’s availability, qualitative analysis has been done using root cause analysis (RCA) approach and the failure causes listed under RCA approach were used to carry system’s failure mode effect analysis (FMEA). The limitations of FMEA in risk ranking were nullified by using fuzzy FMEA and grey relation analysis approaches and the raking results so obtained were compared with FMEA approach based results. The comparison of ranking results would be of high importance for the analyst in deciding the critical/risky component of the considered system with high accuracy. The analysis results were further shared with the mainte- nance manager of the plant for planning and implementing a suitable maintenance policy accordingly. The planned maintenance policy will help in improving the plant’s availability and profitability. The proposed framework has been implemented to carry out the quantitative and quali- tative behavioral analysis of a coal handling system in a coal fired thermal power plant located in North India. Keywords Coal handling system  Fuzzy methodology  PN  Fuzzy FMEA  System availability  GRA 1 Introduction A coal fired thermal power plant is a complex industrial system where failure is an inescapable phenomenon and can be minimized by implementing a proper maintenance policy or strategy. For such industrial systems there are certain issues namely poor maintenance policy, human error, inadequate inspection/testing, rapid change in tech- nology, inadequate and vague availability of failure/repair data which are needed to be addressed to examine the failure behavior of such a system (Adamyan and David 2004; Garg et al. 2012; Panchal and Kumar 2016). How- ever, in the current scenario with the rapid advancement in technology and increase in system complexity, the job of a system analyst/maintenance manager have become more complicated as they have to face the challenge of how to improve the system reliability, performance and opera- tional availability of the process (Aksu and Osman 2006; Hauptmanns 2011; Hu et al. 2010; Cai 1996; Modarres and Kaminski 1999; Vallem and Saravannan 2011; Sharma and Garg 2011). Therefore, to enhance the system’s reliability the study of failure behavior of an industrial system is must. Further, accuracy in the analysis results not only helpful in understanding the system’s failure dynamics but it is also useful in planning and implementing an efficient maintenance policy for the considered system. The efficient & Dilbagh Panchal panchaldilbagh@gmail.com Dinesh Kumar dinesfme@gmail.com 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201313, India 2 Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand 247667, India 123 Int J Syst Assur Eng Manag DOI 10.1007/s13198-017-0579-7