On the optimal redundancy allocation for multi-state series–parallel systems under epistemic uncertainty

Mu-Xia Sun, Yan-Fu Li and Enrico Zio

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2019, vol. 192, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we study the redundancy allocation problem (RAP) for multi-state series–parallel systems (MSSPSs). For each multi-state component, the exact values of its state probabilities are assumed to be unknown, due to epistemic uncertainty (EU), and only conservative lower and upper bounds of them are given. The objective of the RAP is to simultaneously maximize the supremum and infimum of the system's uncertain availability, under a cost constraint. The problem is two-stage and multi-objective. In this work, we: 1. provide a linear-time algorithm to obtain the component state distribution, under which the uncertain system availability will be at its supremum or infimum; 2. show that the problem is reducible to one-stage; 3. analyze the landscape of MSSPS RAP under EU and propose a modified NSGA-II, with targeted designs of repair and local search operation. The proposed algorithm is compared with standard NSGA-II on multiple benchmarks. The results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the standard NSGA-II in both optimality and time efficiency.

Keywords: Redundancy allocation; Multi-state series–parallel systems; Epistemic uncertainty; Stochastic dominance; Approximate system availability analysis; Repair algorithm; Local search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832016310080
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:192:y:2019:i:c:s0951832016310080

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2017.11.025

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().