Redundancy Allocation in A Multi-Level Series System by Cuckoo Search

The systems such as train, airplane and passenger ship require high reliability because of the critical result due to system failure. Redundancy allocation is known as an efficiency method to enhance the system reliability. The methodology of redundancy allocation is developed for a multi-level system with hierarchical structure. This paper considers an optimization algorithm for multi-level redundancy allocation problems(MRAPs). Most of cases in system design employ duplicating single unit in a direct line to improve reliability because of complexity of duplicating units in multi levels. The constraint for the direct line reduces the search space in the optimization problem, but makes it difficult to find feasible solutions in meta-heuristics. Cuckoo search(CS) is presented to optimize MRAP. An upper bound of the number of redundancy is considered to improve search efficiency.