Comparative study of heuristics for reliability optimization of complex systems

Heuristics were created to find solutions for problems that are NP-hard. Although many heuristics have been proposed, few can escape from identifying local optima. This paper presents heuristics applied to Reliability Optimization scenarios and as motivation discusses three heuristics applied to separate models. Although each model is different, they share an underlying commonality; how does one optimize the given problem? Each of the models is presented, and the approach is discussed. The paper continues by reproducing the first model discussed by Wattanapongsakorn et al. using both Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search. While they have been investigated separately, they have not been compared computationally. In this paper, we examine and compare these two techniques and discuss the pros and cons accordingly.