A genetic algorithm for a redundancy allocation problem with the choice of redundancy strategies

A genetic algorithm for a redundancy allocation problem with the choice of redundancy strategies

This paper proposes a genetic algorithm (GA) for a redundancy allocation problem with mixingcomponent. A redundancy strategy can be chosen for individual subsystems of series-parallel systems Majority of the models for the general redundancy allocation problems assume that the redundancystrategy for each subsystem is predetermined and fixed. In general, active redundancy has received moreattention in the past. However, in practice both active and cold-standby redundancies may be used withina particular system design and the choice of the redundancy strategy becomes an additional decision variable. This problem belongs to the NP-hard class of problems. Due to its complexity, it is so difficult tooptimally solve such a problem by using traditional optimization tools. It is demonstrated in this paper thatGA is an efficient method for solving this type of problems. Finally, computational results for a typicalscenario are presented and the robustness of the proposed algorithm is discussed