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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 88
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NINTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURES TECHNOLOGY
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and M. Papadrakakis
Paper 108

A Hybrid Method for Reliability and Redundancy Allocation in a Complex System

W. Elalem1,2, A. El Hami2, R. Ellaia1 and M. Souissi1

1Laboratory of Study and Research in Mathematics Applied, Mohammed V University - Engineering Mohammedia School, Rabat, Morocco
2Laboratory of Mecanics of Rouen, National Institute for Applied Sciences - Rouen, St Etienne du Rouvray, France

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
W. Elalem, A. El Hami, R. Ellaia, M. Souissi, "A Hybrid Method for Reliability and Redundancy Allocation in a Complex System", in B.H.V. Topping, M. Papadrakakis, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 108, 2008. doi:10.4203/ccp.88.108
Keywords: reliability, optimization, redundancy, heuristic, stochastic.

Summary
Reliability optimization plays an important role in the planning and design of modern technological systems. As it is well-known the reliability of an overall system can be increased by adding redundant components or increasing the reliability levels of subsystems, but any kind of redundancy imposes many difficulties such as an increase in the system cost, weight or power.

Decision makers are often faced with the problem of maximizing the reliability of a system subject to certain resource constraints which in general leads to an integer nonlinear programming problem. Many authors [1,2] have developed different algorithms for solving this class of problem and several heuristic, dynamic programming, linear programming, non-linear programming with integer variables, geometric programming methods were summarized in [3].

All these methods look at the same problem in different ways and are quite different in how they carry out their search toward an optimal solution, but we believe that methods collaborating in some way have a good possibility of providing a better performance than the methods on their own.

In this paper we present a new hybrid method that we have called penalty simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation restarted with Sharma-Venkateswaran (PSPSARSV). PSPSARSV is implemented with Matlab and can solve any problem of constrained redundancy optimization in complex systems. A full description of the method is presented and an example of bridge complex system is illustrated to demonstrate the robustness and high performance of the proposed method.

References
1
J. Sharma and K.V.Venkateswaran, "A direct method for maximizing the system reliability", IEEE Transaction on Reliability, 20, 256-259, 1971.
2
K.K. Aggarwal, "Redundancy optimization in general system", IEEE Transaction on Reliability, 25, 330-332, 1976.
3
A.Tillman, C.Hwang, W.Kuo, "Optimization of Systems Reliability", Industrial Engineering, 4, 1980.

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