& Conclusions-A problem specific genetic algorithm (GA) is developed and demonstrated to analyze series-parallel systems and to determine the optimal design configuration when there are multiple component choices available for each of several k-out-of-n:G subsystems. The problem is to select components and levels of redundancy to optimize some objective function given system level constraints o...

Belief functions are a versatile class of mathematical models which include as cases both first order logic and probability statements. Although belief function models have a higher computational cost than probabilistic models, recent progress with graphical belief function models has made complex belief function models computationally feasible. This is especially true in models which have a na...

Reliability optimization is an important step in industrial systems design. In order to develop a reliable system, designers may introduce different redundant technologies with the same functionality in parallel. In this paper, each technology is assumed to be composed of series components. The obtained configuration belongs to the series-parallel systems. The presented tool is for the design o...

In this paper we focus on concurrent processes built on synchronization by means of futures. This concept is an abstraction for processes based on a main execution thread but allowing to delay some computations. The structure of a general concurrent process with futures is more or less a directed acyclic graph. Since the quantitative study of such increasingly labeled graphs (directly related t...

Multi-state Systems (MSS) are those systems whose stochastic degradation process is characterized by several performance levels varying from nominal functioning to complete failure. MSS arise naturally in many application areas. Since, MSS reliability evaluation and estimation has received a great attention from researchers and a wide range of papers dealing with MSS exist in the literature. In...

In the contest-theoretic literature on the attack and defense of networks of targets the focus has primarily been on pure-strategy equilibria. In a prominent class of these models, we show that for much of the parameter space examined pure-strategy equilibria do not exist. Therefore, all such “characterizations” of the pure-strategy equilibria over these parameter configurations are invalid. On...

The objective of the redundancy allocation problem is to select the parts to be used and a design configuration to optimize some objective function without violating systemlevel constraints. In this paper, the problem was formulated in a more general framework than has previously been accomplished, allowing for the explicit consideration of the risk-profile of system designers and users. Risk i...

Recently Li and Yam (2005) studied which ageing properties for series and parallel systems are inherited for the components. In this paper we provide new results for the increasing convex and concave orders, the increasing mean residual life (IMRL), decreasing failure rate (DFR), the new worse than used in expectation (NWUE), the increasing failure rate in average (IFRA), the decreasing failure...