A sequential two-stage approach based on variational Bayesian inference for reliability-redundancy allocation

The reliability-related design has been a crucial chain in complex and reliability-critical engineering systems. It serves as a preventive countermeasure to catastrophic failures caused by uncertainties. To keep up with this rapidly developing field, this paper presents a novel metaheuristic, based on the variational Bayesian inference (VBI) to efficiently solve the optimal reliability design. Specifically, the reliability-redundancy allocation problem (RRAP). The proposed metaheuristic starts from a primary population, then leverages VBI to fully excavate the information of feasible individuals from the previous generation, in order to produce the next-generation population. This process is iterated until the solution converges to the optimal decision scheme. In addition, we set up an automatic stratification strategy, so that the new individuals can approach the optimal solution faster. Furthermore, we divide RRAP into a reliability optimization problem (ROP) and a redundancy allocation problem (RAP). This not only reduces the dimension of decision variables, but also speeds up the convergence. ROP and RAP are solved sequentially and iteratively until the preset stopping condition is satisfied. The case studies showcase that the proposed approach can obtain the optimal or near-optimal solution within a reasonable period. © IMechE 2022.