ABSTRACT
As complex systems, have become global and essential in today’s society, their reliable design and the determination of their availability have turned into a very important task for managers and engineers. Industrial robots are examples of these complex systems that are being increasingly used for intelligent transportation, production, and distribution of materials in warehouses and automated production lines. In this chapter, two techniques of reliability evaluation are developed for a complex system of robots. Decomposition method (DM) and minimal path and cuts method (MPCM) are adapted for the proposed complex system. For practical implementation, a robot system is first modeled. Then, reliability block diagram is adopted to model the complex system for reliability evaluation purpose. Consider a complex production system including automated processes and multiple robots. In this system, appropriate functioning of the facilities is guaranteed by the functioning of its vital equipment. The question is how to evaluate and analyze the performance of the system defined by the availability of the whole system. In this regard, the reliability evaluation comes to the picture as an effective instrument. While the system under consideration is complex due to having many material handling robots, developing an efficient approach to compute and analyze system reliability has a significant benefit.
