Improvement of system reliability in a natural gas processing facility by PSO and DE

Abstract

The reliability of the systems as well as its optimization is the first concern of the designers. The elements of a given system can be either in series, parallel, parallel-series, or in a complex configuration. This paper addresses the reliability optimization of a natural gas processing facility. The reliability of this system is calculated and two redundancies strategies, active and standby, are optimized under the resource limits to improve reliability. Two bio-inspired optimization algorithms, namely the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the differential evolution (DE), are implemented with penalty functions to find the optimal redundancy. The results obtained are compared.