A heuristics method based on ant colony optimisation for redundancy allocation problems. (11th February 2011) - Liao, Wenzhu
Reliability allocation as an optimisation tool is to minimise the total amount of resource subject to the constraints of overall safety goals. Redundancy allocation problem is a multi-objective optimisation problem which has been shown to be NP-hard formulated with objectives of maximising its reliability while minimising the total resource. However, existing approaches are limited to the use in problems of small size. Considering the scale of the problems faced nowadays, a heuristic method is developed in this study based on ant colony optimisation, then tabu search technique, whose framework of short-term and long-term memories provides the parallel searching ability for both global and local area, is used to improve it. A case study using this heuristic method is presented. The developed method performs well and the computational result proves its efficiency.