OPTIMIZATION APPROACHES TO THE REDUNDANCY ALLOCATION PROBLEM FOR SERIES -PARALLEL SYSTEMS

The redundancy allocation problem involves the selection of components and the appropriate levels of redundancy to maximize reliability or minimize cost of a series-parallel system given design constraints. Different optimization approaches have been previously applied to the problem including dynamic programming, integer programming, and mixed integer and nonlinear programming. However these approaches can only solve sub-classes of the problem. This paper presents a review of the different optimization approaches and presents a new approach, a genetic algorithm (GA) which can solve the general class of the redundancy allocation problem. The GA is demonstrated on two different problems and compared with the other techniques.