Redundancy Allocation in an Industry using Multi-Objective Optimization – A Review

Abstract

Reliability engineering is engineering that highlights dependability in a product’s lifecycle management. Dependability, or reliability, describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a set time period. Reliability engineering represents a branch of systems engineering. Reliability can be defined as the probability of success as the frequency of failures; or in terms of availability, as a probability based on reliability, maintainability and testability. In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system thus increasing system’s reliability, usually in backup or fail-safe form, or actual system performance improvement, like in the GNSS receivers’ case, or multi-threaded computer processing. In either case, inventory should contain some components or subsystems to replace the failed components. Factors like budget or storage space limits the number of components in inventory can be limited by. The redundancy allocation problem is a way to maximize reliability while minimizing the cost.