Alternative design redundancy allocation using an efficient heuristic and a honey bee mating algorithm

This study presents a new method to reduce the redundancy in serial-parallel system with linear constraints. The complexity of this problem is known as NP-hard and therefore the optimal solution is not accessible in the normal course of events. The modeling formulation deals with the allocation of different units/components with various reliabilities and characteristics and the objective is to maximize the total reliability. We develop an efficient heuristic which could efficiently compete with other existing methods in the literature. Also a honey bee mating optimization algorithm is developed for the first time to solve the redundancy allocation problems with large number of constraints. The proposed methods are tested on various test problems especially the 33 existing benchmark instances in the literature. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed method yield promising results in a reasonable amount of time.