An Adjusted Water Cycle Algorithm for Solving Reliability-redundancy Allocation Problems with Cold-standby Components

One of the most practical methods for improving system reliability is making a tradeoff between components reliability and redundancy levels, which is known as reliability-redundancy allocation problem (RRAP). The RRAP aims to maximize the overall system reliability by creating a balance between the component reliabilities and the number of redundant components in each subsystem. In the RRAP, the redundant components are performed in a predetermined order under a redundancy strategy. In this paper, a cold standby redundancy strategy is considered for the redundant components. Besides, a penalty guided water cycle algorithm is adjusted for solving the problem. The proposed algorithm is implemented on two famous benchmark problems to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The obtained numerical results reveal the superiority of the proposed solution method over all previous studies.