Duan Li, Xiaoling Sun and Ken McKinnon
Technical Report MS 00-018
Abstract
Systems reliability can be improved by adding redundant components or
increasing the reliability levels of subsystems. Determination of the
optimal amount of redundancy and reliability levels among various
subsystems under limited resource constraints leads to a mixed-integer
nonlinear programming problem. The continuous relaxation of this
problem is a nonconvex nonseparable optimization problem with certain
monotone properties. In this paper a convexification method is
proposed for solving this class of continuous relaxation problems.
Combined with a branch-and-bound method, our solution scheme provides
an efficient way to find an exact optimal solution for reliability
optimization in complex systems.
Key words:
Reliability optimization, global optimization, convexification method,
outer approximation, branch-and-bound.
Text
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