This post is an excerpt from the journal ISA Transactions. All ISA Transactions articles are free to ISA members, or can be purchased from Elsevier Press.
Abstract: Traditionally, in the redundancy allocation problem (RAP), two general classes of optimization problems are considered; reliability optimization and availability optimization. Contrary to reliability optimization, fewer researchers have studied availability optimization to find out the optimal combination of components type and redundancy levels for each subsystem in a system for maximizing (or minimizing) the objectives. In each problem it is assumed that either the entire components are repairable or they are non-repairable. However, in real world situations, systems usually consist of both repairable and non-repairable components. In this paper a new Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model is presented to analyze the availability optimization of a system with a given structure, using both repairable and non-repairable components, simultaneously. To find the solution of the introduced MINLP, an efficient Genetic Algorithm (GA) is also developed. Furthermore, to show the efficiency of the proposed GA, a numerical example is presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GA has a better performance compared to one of the most recommended algorithm in the literature.
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