Abstract: In the development process of modern industrial systems, predictive reliability becomes very important in the design and exploitation of industrial facilities. This paper proposes the development of a new approach to the assessment of predictive reliability, applied to a centrifugal pump based on a fuzzy expert system to improve its performance under actual operating conditions. The obtained results clearly demonstrate how the reproduction of the main dynamic characteristics of the examined pump, using the proposed fuzzy model enables better performance regarding reliability.

Reliability analysis is essential for ensuring dependability in industrial systems. Today, the technological evolution of industrial equipment has led to significant progress in the areas of quality and dependability to meet the needs of the user, particularly in the process of quality improvement that impacts the predicted reliability. Indeed, reliability has become a key quality and decision support parameter because reliability covers multiple aspects, such as failure analysis systems.

Several studies have been conducted to assess as accurately as possible the predictive reliability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6]. Many persistent problems exist in the field of predictive reliability, such as population samples, rates of non-constant failures, lengthy and expensive trials, missing data and other technical and practical problems. This work proposes a fuzzy model describing the predictive reliability of a centrifugal pump. This method of evaluation and reliability analysis is based on the field of artificial intelligence, specifically fuzzy expert systems, and offers advantageous performance in the modelling of the predicted reliability of the process considered.

In this work, through the various tests using real data, we clearly demonstrate that the obtained results using the proposed fuzzy model reproduce the main reliability features in the examined pump, allowing for the best performance when used for calculations of the failure rates of each component of the examined centrifugal pump.