An Advanced Optimal Algorithm for the Reliability Optimization Problem of a Series System with Multiple-Choice using Cost-to-Reliability Approach

Reliability is a concept applied to systems used in various industrial sites and has been considered as an important measure in system design. The problem of determining the system structure to achieve optimal reliability under various constraints such as cost has been addressed and called Reliability Optimization Problems (ROP). But, the ROP is represented as a nonlinear binary integer programming problem and characterized as an NP-hard because it is the same as a knapsack problem with multiple choice constraints. So, various heuristic techniques have been developed to find relatively better solutions, rather than finding the best optimal solution. In this paper, the concept of cost-to-effectiveness is applied to the objective function to maximize reliability per unit cost setting the available budget to upper bound and the reliability at least to be satisfied to lower bound. Also, this study introduces an algorithm that guarantees global optimality of the ROP, and proves that it dramatically reduces the time required for finding optimal solution through GAMS experiments.