AN EFFICIENT HEURISTIC ALGORITHM FOR DETERMINING OPTIMAL REDUNDANCY ALLOCATION OF COMPLEX NETWORKS

The paper presents a new heuristic algorithm for determining optimal redundancy allocation of complex networks. Th e present algorithm is an iterative method; all the paths of the network are first arranged in decreasing order of their priority determined using a path sensitivity factor, the highest priority path is optimized first by adding redundant components for suof the path iteratively based on proposed subsystem selection factor. In case of availability of any residual resources next lower priority paths are considered for redundancy allocation. The proposed algorithm not only demonstrates improved performance in comparison with most of the existing heuristic algorithms but also leaves minimum slack of components without any further possibility of redundancy.