Solving cold-standby reliability redundancy allocation problems using a new swarm intelligence algorithm

Abstract

A powerful new hybrid algorithm based on Simplified Swarm Optimization (SSO), Elite Selection and Boundary Search (BS), called the SEB, is proposed for solving the cold-standby reliability redundancy allocation problem (RRAP). The RRAP is a famous mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem in system design that requires that the reliability objective be set to satisfy the resource consumption constraint. In order to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, the proposed SEB implements a new SSO to update the solutions, an elite selection is performed to select the solutions for subsequent iterations, and the new BS improves the best solution. The performance of the proposed SEB is evaluated by comparing the results with those obtained using existing algorithms and three RRAP benchmark problems taken from the literature.