Multi-path heuristic for redundancy allocation: the tree heuristic

A tree heuristic is presented for solving the general redundancy allocation problem in reliability optimization. The tree heuristic can obtain several local optima by branching off the main searching path when some criterions are satisfied. Then, the best local optima is selected for the final solution. The tree heuristic is a simple, efficient, iterative heuristic for any integer nonlinear programming problems with increasing constraint functions. Iterative heuristics are normally trapped in a local optimum. However, the tree heuristic can overcome local optima by branching the solution path. The experiments show that the proposed heuristic is very efficient in terms of solution quality, and computation time.