System Reliability Modeling with Redundancy Allocation Problem by Considering Degradation Process

Redundancy allocation is an efficient way to improve reliability of many systems. Determining the best configuration is one of the most critical issues in Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) for optimizing the performance of the system. In most of the case, components assume in cold-standby state which work as well as new ones when they are activated. However, even in standby conditions, the components are suffered from performance degradation. In this paper, the reliability of a series-parallel system is study where all components in each sub-system have the same characteristics and suffer from performance degradation even when in standby state. Objective of RAP is determining an optimal configuration of components for maximizing reliability of system with considering constraints such as cost, weight and etc. Often, it is not possible to finding a definite value for this problem in large scales. However, in this paper a new approach is presented to obtaining exact solution to this problem. Genetic algorithm with dual mutation is utilized to solving this highly constrained optimization problem. Finally, a numerical example is explored for mentioning efficiencies of proposed solution approach