Summary
The scope of this study is to review reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) analysis in the food industry and aims to identify the critical points of the production systems that should be improved by the operational performance and the maintenance effectiveness. RAM is an engineering tool that addresses operations and safety issues of production lines and aims to identify areas within the system or process where significant improvement can be achieved. Food production lines consist of several machines supplied with a common transfer mechanism and control system that have different failure modes. When a random failure occurs, the failed machine stops and forces most of the line upstream of the failure to operate without processing, whereas the material (raw, intermediate or end‐product) of the line downstream may have to be scrapped because of quality deterioration during the stoppage. The negative failure impact is the drop of line reliability and production rate.