System design optimization with mixed subsystems failure dependencies

Abstract

Systems present dependencies among their components failure behavior, which impact their ultimate availability. Previous works addressed the optimal design of systems in relation to its cost and under given availability constraint, considering identical subsystems failure dependencies. The present paper addresses this problem in a realistic scenario by taking into consideration mixed subsystems failure dependencies. The problem is formulated with reference to a complex bridge network system and a series-parallel system. Three nature-inspired optimization techniques are implemented to solve the problem, namely differential evolution (DE), manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO), and shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) with constraint handling. A numerical evaluation is performed; the results show that DE outperforms MRFO and SFLA