An annotated overview of system-reliability optimization

This paper provides: • an overview of the methods that have been developed since 1977 for solving various reliability optimization problems; • applications of these methods to various types of design problems; • heuristics, metaheuristic algorithms, exact methods, reliability-redundancy allocation, multi-objective optimization and assignment of interchangeable components in reliability systems. Like other applications, exact solutions for reliability optimization problems are not necessarily desirable because exact solutions are difficult to obtain, and even when they are available, their utility is marginal. A majority of the recent work in this area is devoted to developing heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms for solving optimal redundancy-allocation problems. © 2000 IEEE.