Multiobjective reliability and redundancy optimization of a series-parallel system by the Surrogate Worth Trade-off method

Abstract This paper deals with the multiobjective reliability and redundancy allocation problems of a series-parallel system through the application of the Surrogate Worth Trade-off method. The formulated problem is to assign reliability and redundancy to each stage such that both system reliability and cost are optimized subject to multiple constraints, which becomes a multiobjective nonlinear mixed-integer programming problem. On the basis of the Surrogate Worth Trade-off method, a simple approximate method is proposed to obtain the preferred solution of the decision maker. An illustrative numerical example is provided to indicate the efficiency of the proposed method.