Ant colony approach to constrained redundancy optimization in binary systems

This paper presents an ant colony optimization algorithm to address the constrained redundancy allocation problem in order to maximize system reliability for complex binary systems. The constraints involved, though separable, are both linear and non-linear. We couple an adaptive penalty function with the basic ant colony approach to handle highly constrained problems and embed a local search technique to find still better locally optimal solutions. The proposed algorithm has been tested on a large number of problems, containing even up to 500 subsystems, with both fixed and randomly generated parameters. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed algorithm to solve similar types of problems. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.