Optimal Redundancy Allocation in Hierarchical Series-Parallel Systems Using Mixed Integer Programming

Reliability optimization plays an important role in design, operation and management of the industrial systems. System reliability can be easily enhanced by improving the reliability of unreliable components and/or by using redundant configuration with subsystems/components in parallel. Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) was studied in this research. A mixed integer programming model was proposed to solve the problem, which considers simultaneously two objectives under several resource constraints. The model is only for the hierarchical series-parallel systems in which the elements of any subset of subsystems or components are connected in series or parallel and constitute a larger subsystem or total system. At the end of the study, the performance of the proposed approach was evaluated by a numerical example.