Solving a Joint Availability-Redundancy Optimization Model with Multistate Components and Metaheuristic Approach

Redundancy allocation problem (RAP) is one of the most important and applicable problems in reliability area. This problem aims to find the optimal configuration of system components in order to optimize system reliability under some constraints. In classical model, the system component states are binary, i.e., each component is whether working or failed. In new research studies, the components are considered as multistate components, i.e., each component may have some working states ranging from full performance to completely fail. In this paper, we work on an RAP with multistate components and the performance rate of each working state may increase by spending technical and organizational activities costs. Because RAP belongs to Np-hard problems, we used Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) for solving the presented problem and the Universal Generating Function (UGF) for calculating system reliability.