Reliability allocation using analytical target cascading method

Analytical target cascading (ATC) is a methodology for translating system design targets to design specifications for the elements comprising a decomposed engineering system. The paper introduces ATC to the application on the reliability allocation and presented a new algorithm based on exterior penalty function, called ATC-EPF. The method can deal with huge scale reliability allocation problem by the decomposition and coordination of targets between upper and lower level. The examples in the paper show that the proposed method can achieve good results as the same as the all-in-one method.