Optimal Reliability Allocation with Discrete Cost-Reliability Data for Components

Subba Rao V. Majety, Milind Dawande and Jayant Rajgopal
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Subba Rao V. Majety: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261
Milind Dawande: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598
Jayant Rajgopal: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261

Operations Research, 1999, vol. 47, issue 6, 899-906

Abstract: This paper addresses the optimal allocation of reliability among components that are to be assembled into a system. While it is a generally accepted notion that a component's cost is an increasing function of its reliability, most research to date adopts exponentially increasing, closed-form functions to relate cost and reliability. However, in practice such functions are often unknown or difficult to construct, and it is often more reasonable to describe cost-reliability relationships via discrete data sets. We consider such situations, where each component is available at several reliability levels with corresponding costs. The design optimization problem results in a nonlinear integer program. Because every system configuration has an equivalent representation as either a series connection of parallel subsystems or a parallel connection of series subsystems, we provide formulations, linear relaxations, and algorithms for these two.

Keywords: reliability; allocation and optimization; programming; integer (application algorithms) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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