Soft computing approach for reliability optimization: State-of-the-art survey

Mitsuo Gen and YoungSu Yun

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2006, vol. 91, issue 9, 1008-1026

Abstract: In the broadest sense, reliability is a measure of performance of systems. As systems have grown more complex, the consequences of their unreliable behavior have become severe in terms of cost, effort, lives, etc., and the interest in assessing system reliability and the need for improving the reliability of products and systems have become very important. Most solution methods for reliability optimization assume that systems have redundancy components in series and/or parallel systems and alternative designs are available. Reliability optimization problems concentrate on optimal allocation of redundancy components and optimal selection of alternative designs to meet system requirement. In the past two decades, numerous reliability optimization techniques have been proposed. Generally, these techniques can be classified as linear programming, dynamic programming, integer programming, geometric programming, heuristic method, Lagrangean multiplier method and so on. A Genetic Algorithm (GA), as a soft computing approach, is a powerful tool for solving various reliability optimization problems. In this paper, we briefly survey GA-based approach for various reliability optimization problems, such as reliability optimization of redundant system, reliability optimization with alternative design, reliability optimization with time-dependent reliability, reliability optimization with interval coefficients, bicriteria reliability optimization, and reliability optimization with fuzzy goals. We also introduce the hybrid approaches for combining GA with fuzzy logic, neural network and other conventional search techniques. Finally, we have some experiments with an example of various reliability optimization problems using hybrid GA approach.

Keywords: Reliability optimization problems; Nonlinear integer programming (nIP); Nonlinear mixed integer programming (nMIP); Multi-objective reliability optimization problems; Genetic algorithm (GA); Neural network (NN); Fuzzy logic; Interval coefficient; Fuzzy goal; Rough search technique; Local search technique; Hybrid strategy method; Iterative hill climbing method; Revised simplex search method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:91:y:2006:i:9:p:1008-1026

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2005.11.053

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