Efficient exact optimization of multi-objective redundancy allocation problems in series-parallel systems

Dingzhou Cao, Alper Murat and Ratna Babu Chinnam

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2013, vol. 111, issue C, 154-163

Abstract: This paper proposes a decomposition-based approach to exactly solve the multi-objective Redundancy Allocation Problem for series-parallel systems. Redundancy allocation problem is a form of reliability optimization and has been the subject of many prior studies. The majority of these earlier studies treat redundancy allocation problem as a single objective problem maximizing the system reliability or minimizing the cost given certain constraints. The few studies that treated redundancy allocation problem as a multi-objective optimization problem relied on meta-heuristic solution approaches. However, meta-heuristic approaches have significant limitations: they do not guarantee that Pareto points are optimal and, more importantly, they may not identify all the Pareto-optimal points. In this paper, we treat redundancy allocation problem as a multi-objective problem, as is typical in practice. We decompose the original problem into several multi-objective sub-problems, efficiently and exactly solve sub-problems, and then systematically combine the solutions. The decomposition-based approach can efficiently generate all the Pareto-optimal solutions for redundancy allocation problems. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method over meta-heuristic methods on a numerical example taken from the literature.

Keywords: Redundancy allocation problem; Multi-objective optimization; Decomposition; Series-parallel systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:111:y:2013:i:c:p:154-163

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2012.09.013

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