Mathematical model and heuristics for maximizing reliability of parallel systems with alternatives and budget constraints

Reliability is defined as the ability to perform a given function over a period of time in a particular environment. Designing problem of the system structure appears in many industries, and various reliability optimization issues arise. Especially in military defence area, it is very important to achieve maximum reliability under a given budget. In this study, maximum reliability optimization problem in parallel system, each component has several alternatives, and limited budget reliability optimization problem is considered. Objective function of the problem is expressed as a nonlinear function because it is a reliability of a parallel system. Therefore, it is generally known as difficult to obtain a global optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a heuristic methodology that solves the problem by using Combinatorial Bender's Cut. The results of experiments proved that the proposed algorithm showed good performance in terms of value of the obtained reliability and consumed CPU time. Keywords : parallel system, reliability, nonlinear programming, heuristic DOI: 10.7176/IEL/10-2-07 Publication date:April 30th 202