Solving Cold-Standby Reliability-Redundancy Allocation Problems with Particle-Based Simplified Swarm Optimization

Abstract

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simplified swarm optimization (SSO) are two of the state-of-the-art swarm intelligence technique that is widely utilized for optimization purposes. This paper describes a particle-based simplified swarm optimization (PSSO) procedure which combines the update mechanisms (UMs) of PSO and SSO to determine optimal system reliability for reliability-redundancy allocation problems (RRAPs) with cold-standby strategy while aimed at maximizing the system reliability. With comprehensive experimental test on the typical and famous four benchmarks of RRAP, PSSO is compared with other recently introduced algorithms in four different widely used systems, i.e., a series system, a series-parallel system, a complex (bridge) system, and an overspeed protection system for a gas turbine. Finally, the results of the experiments demonstrate that the PSSO can effectively solve the system of RRAP with cold-standby strategy and has good performance in the system reliability obtained although the best system reliability is not obtained in all four benchmarks.