An efficient heuristic for series-parallel redundant reliability problems

This paper presents a novel algorithm for solving a series-parallel redundancy allocation problem with separable constraints. The idea of a heuristic approach design is inspired from the greedy method and the genetic algorithm. The structure of the algorithm includes: (1) randomly generating a specified population size number of minimum workable solutions; (2) assigning components either according to the greedy method or to the random selection method; and (3) improving solutions through an inner-system and inter-system solution revision process. Numerical results for the 33 test problems from previous research are reported and compared. As reported in this paper, the solutions found by our approach are all better than or are in par with the well-known best solutions from the approach taken by previous solutions. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.