Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets for Reliability Analysis of Lube Oil System with Common-Cause Failures

A very high level of availab ility is crucial to the economic operation of modern power plants, in view of the huge expenditure associated with their failures. Th is paper deals with the availab ility analysis of a Lube oil system used in a combined cycle power plant. The system is modeled as a Generalized Stochastic Petri Net (GSPN) taking into consideration of partial failures of their subsystems and common-cause failures; analyzed using Monte Carlo Simu lation approach. The major benefit of GSPN approach is hardware, software and human behavior can be modeled using the same language and hence more suitable to model co mplex system like power p lants. The superiority of this approach over others such as network, fault tree and Markov analysis are outlined. The numerical estimates of availability, failure criticality index o f various subsystems, co mponents causing unavailability of lube oil system are brought out. The proposed GSPN is a pro mising tool that can be conveniently used to model and analyze any co mplex systems.