Enhancing Reliability of Ship Propulsion System using Markov Model

Abstract

Ships trade  internationally, transporting cargo on a large scale, which is several thousand  times more than  the cargo carried  through  any other  mode of transport from one destination to another,  with unfailing operation of propulsion and essential machinery.  This makes it imperative  that  propulsion as well as auxiliary machinery should be always available in a good condition.  The availability  in fact is a direct measure of how reliable the machinery is.

This paper presents applicability  of time-homogenous Markov processes to fuel oil systems, for marine diesel engines running  on heavy fuel oils. We determine  the limiting distribution of the process of the changes of technical states  of fuel systems and  hence calculate  the  reliability  and  availability  of the  System.   The  proposed study of this process includes eight components of fuel oil system, which constitutes eight states  and a transition state  model has been developed.

Numerical  study  has been carried  out  to analyze the  stationary probabilities and limiting distribution of the process.