Proposal of Simulated Annealing Algorithms for Optimal Arrangement in a Circular Consecutive-k-out-of-n: F System

Abstract

A circular consecutive-k-out-of-n: F system consists of n components arranged along a circular path. This system fails if and only if k or more consecutive components fail. As the number of components n increases, the amount of calculation to solve optimal component arrangement problems in this kind of system exactly would be too much. In this paper, we propose two types of simulated annealing algorithms to obtain quasi optimal solutions for such problems. We compare their performances with a genetic algorithm proposed in the previous research work and demonstrate the advantage of our proposed algorithms through numerical experiments.