HEURISTIC APPROACH FOR HETEROGENEOUS REDUNDANCY OPTIMIZATION IN MULTI-STATE SERIES-PARALLEL SYSTEM

The paper presents a heuristic for series-parallel system, exhibiting multi-state behavior, with the objective to minimize the cost in order to provide a desired level of reliability. System reliability is defined as the ability to satisfy consumers demand and is presented as a piecewise cumulative load curve. The components are binary and chosen from the list of products available in the market, and are being characterized by their feeding capacity, reliability and cost. The solution approach makes use of heterogeneous collection of components to provide redundancy in a subsystem. The algorithm has been applied to power systems from the literature for various levels of reliability requirement. The heuristic offers a straightforward analysis and efficiency over genetic algorithm (GA) existing in the literature. Keeping in view the computational efficiency and the observed solution quality the proposed heuristic is appealing. As such, the heuristic developed is attractive and can be easily and efficiently applied to numerous real life systems.