Total Productive Maintenance
Assignment
Reliability
Analyze and solve the following problems. Put a box on your final answer.
1. What is the reliability of the system
shown below?
2. What is the reliability of the following
parallel production process?
R1 0.95, R2 0.90, R3 0.98
5. Rick Wing, salesperson for Wave
Soldering Systems, Inc. (WSSI), has
provided you with a proposal for
improving the temperature control on
your present machine. The machine uses
3. Elizabeth Irwin’s design team has a hot-air knife to cleanly remove excess
proposed the following system with solder from printed circuit boards; this is
component reliabilities as indicated: a great concept, but the hot-air
temperature control lacks reliability.
According to Wing, engineers at WSSI
have improved the reliability of the
critical temperature controls. The new
system still has the four sensitive,
integrated circuits controlling the
What is the reliability of the system?
temperature, but the new machine has a
Hint: The system functions if either R2 backup for each. The four integrated
or R3 work.
circuits have reliabilities of .90, .92,
.94, and .96. The four backup circuits all
4. As VP for operations at Mendez-Cruz have a reliability of .90.
Engineering, you must decide which
a. What is the reliability of the new
product design, A or B, has the highest temperature controller?
reliability. B is design with backup units
b. If you pay a premium, Wing says he
for components R3 and R4. What is the can improve all four of the backup
reliability of each design? units to .93. What is the reliability
of this option?