Availability Optimization of K-out-of-N Load Sharing Systems

this paper models the availability of a repairable system with multiple subsystems in which the involved components follow load sharing strategy. In redundancy allocation problems, the redundancy level is just considered, whereas, in this paper, the number of repair facility (repairman) is added to decision variables. The goal is to find the optimal number of repairmen and redundant components in each subsystem for optimization of availability subject to weight, cost and volume constraints. This problem belongs to nonlinear programming. Due to complexity, a simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to solve the problem