Abstract
Nowadays the redundancy allocation problem (RAP) is increasingly becoming an important problem in the initial stages of or prior to planning, designing, and control of systems. The multiple multi-level redundancy allocation problem (MMRAP) is an extension of the traditional RAP such that all available items for redundancy (system, module, and component) can be simultaneously chosen. In this paper, a discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm (DPSO) is presented to solve MMRAP in series systems such that some subsystems or modules consist of different components in series. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use a PSO to solve MMRAP. The result obtained by DPSO has been compared with those from genetic algorithm (GA). Computational results show that the proposed DPSO is competitive in the number of finding best solutions, the average earliest finding best solutions, and computation times.