Optimization of Component Allocation/Distribution and Sequencing in Warm Standby Series-Parallel Systems

Existing works on redundancy allocation problems have typically focused on active or cold standby redundancies or a mix of them; little research is dedicated to warm standby systems but with an assumption of allocating the same choice of components within each subsystem. Motivated by the fact that components with different costs and failure time distributions from different vendors can be available for the design of the same subsystem in practice, this paper advances the state-of-the-art by presenting a solution methodology to determine combined optimal design configuration and optimal operation of heterogeneous warm standby series-parallel systems. Particularly, based on a proposed numerical reliability evaluation algorithm, two combined optimization problems (component allocation and sequencing problem, and component distribution and sequencing problem) are formulated and solved. Necessity and significance of the proposed methodology are illustrated through examples. Efficiency of the methodology is also successfully demonstrated on large warm standby series-parallel systems containing 14 subsystems of different choices of components.