An exact method for solving reliability redundancy allocation problem of k-out-of-n systems with a choice of redundancy strategy

One of the most important problems in the system reliability optimization is redundancy allocation problem that has been studied in different system configurations. K-out-of-n structure is a general system configuration and offers enhanced capabilities for analyzing more design problems. Hence, in this paper, the redundancy allocation problem of k-out-of-n systems is studied. In the most previous researches of this problem, a predetermined redundancy strategy is assumed within each subsystem. However, in practice, the choice of redundancy strategy provides more improvement in system reliability. Thus in this paper, the choice of redundancy strategies is considered as decision variables. First the problem is mathematically modeled. Then to overcome the structural complexity of the model, we develop a new linear mathematical formulation to solve the problem with integer programming methods. The proposed algorithm is tested on a well-known test problem that extracted from previous researches. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.