A machine learning methodology for reliability evaluation of complex chemical production systems.

System reliability evaluation is very important for safe operation and sustainable development of complex chemical production systems. This paper proposes a hybrid model for the reliability evaluation of chemical production systems. First, the influential factors in system reliability are categorized into five aspects: Man, Machine, Material, Management and Environment (4M1E), each of which represents a component subsystem of a complex chemical production process. Second, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm is used to develop machine learning models for the reliability evaluation of each subsystem, during which Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is applied for model parameter optimization. Third, the Random Forest (RF) algorithm is employed to correlate the reliability of the five subsystems with the reliability of the corresponding whole chemical production system. Then, Markov Chain Residual error Correction (MCRC) is adopted to improve the predictive accuracy of the machine learning model. The efficacy of the proposed hybrid model is tested on a case study, and the results indicate that the proposed model is capable of delivering satisfactory prediction results.