Reliability improvements for automation systems

Abstract

Automation systems occupy an important place in todays industry, from manufacturing to electrical grid protection and control and much more. They perform complex functions with high reliability requirements. The reliability analysis of such systems is a demanding task for the system engineers. Consequently efficient means to compute the reliability and ways to automatically suggest reliability improvements are needed. To this end, we propose two methods for automatic suggestion of reliability improvements based on duplication and upgrades of automation and communication equipment. The first method identifies critical devices in the system to improve reliability in a greedy manner and the second method recommends reliability improvements using a genetic algorithm. Both methods are evaluated on synthetic and real automation networks topologies, and they identify reliability improvement solutions in a timely manner.