The Robust Deviation Redundancy Allocation Problem With Interval Component Reliabilities

Abstract

We propose a robust deviation framework to deal with uncertain component reliabilities in the constrained redundancy optimization problem (CROP) in series-parallel reliability systems. The proposed model is based on a linearized binary version of standard nonlinear integer programming formulations of this problem. We extend the linearized model to address uncertainty by assuming that the component reliabilities belong to an interval uncertainty set, where only upper and lower bounds are known for each component reliability, and develop a Min-Max regret model to handle data uncertainty. A key challenge is that, because the deterministic model involves nonlinear functions of the uncertain data, classical robust deviation approaches cannot be applied directly to find robust solutions. We exploit problem structures to develop four exact solution methods, and present computational results demonstrating their performance.