OPTIMAL REDUNDANCY FOR RELIABILITY IN SERIES SYSTEMS

Study of problem of determining the optimal number of redundant components to maximize the reliability of a series system subject to multiple resource restrictions. Associated zero-one programming problem is solved by a branch-and- bound procedure. It is shown that the optimal solution to the associated problem is equivalent to the optimal solution for the optimal redundancy problem and that the technique solves fairly large problems with multiple constraints without excessive storage-space requirements.