1 Optimization of Reliability Improvement Allocation

If a system does not meet its reliability requirements, the situation is usually improved by increasing the reliability of each of its components. There are many ways in which this can be done. We present a method to find an optimal combination that leads to a satisfactory system reliability with minimum cost. The algorithm is based on efficient implementation of a greedy heuristic, which avoids converging to a non-global optimum and guarantees finding a good approximation of the optimum with relatively low computational effort. The method is applicable for series, parallel and more general system configurations.