Abstract
This research presents an approach based upon ant-colony optimization to address the system reliability problem. For each component of a system, the number of units in parallel needs to be chosen to maximize the reliability for the entire system. As more parallel units are selected, costs increase in a proportional fashion. For this effort, quantity discounts for additional parallel units are considered, and the budget for purchase of parallel units is limited. Ant colony optimization methodology is employed to find an optimal system reliability that satisfies the budget constraint. The methodology is employed for several test problems, and near-optimal solutions are found.
Highlights
In the pursuit of system design and system engineering, it is important to construct a reliable system
This research presents an approach based upon ant-colony optimization to address the system reliability problem
The effective reliability of an individual component is a function of the number of backup or parallel units
Summary
In the pursuit of system design and system engineering, it is important to construct a reliable system. One general way to do this is to include redundancies for each component. This is done to overcome failures of individual components. The cost increases for each redundancy, or backup unit that is added to the component. The reliability of a system is the mathematical product of the effective reliability for each individual component. The effective reliability of an individual component is a function of the number of backup or parallel units. This principle is well-documented [1] [2] [3]. The effective cost rises when more parallel units are added.
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