Self-Organizing Migrating Strategies Applied to Reliability-Redundancy Optimization of Systems

The reliability-redundancy allocation problem is a mixed-integer programming problem. It has been solved by using optimization techniques such as dynamic programming, integer programming, mixed-integer non-linear programming, heuristics, and meta-heuristics. Meanwhile, the development of meta-heuristics has been an active research area in optimizing system reliability wherein the redundancy, the component reliability, or both are to be determined. In recent years, a broad class of stochastic algorithms, such as simulated annealing, evolutionary computation, and swarm intelligence algorithms, has been developed for reliability-redundancy optimization of systems. Recently, a new class of stochastic optimization algorithm called SOMA (Self-Organizing Migrating Algorithm) has emerged. SOMA works on a population of potential solutions called specimen, and is based on the self-organizing behavior of groups of individuals in a "social environment". This paper introduces a modified SOMA approach based on a Gaussian operator to solve reliability-redundancy optimization problems. In this context, three examples of mixed integer programming in reliability-redundancy design problems are evaluated. In this application domain, SOMA was found to outperform the previously best-known solutions available.