Cold-standby redundancy allocation problem with degrading components

Components in cold-standby state are usually assumed to be as good as new when they are activated. However, even in a standby environment, the components will suffer from performance degradation. This article presents a study of a redundancy allocation problem (RAP) for cold-standby systems with degrading components. The objective of the RAP is to determine an optimal design configuration of components to maximize system reliability subject to system resource constraints (e.g. cost, weight). As in most cases, it is not possible to obtain a closed-form expression for this problem, and hence, an approximated objective function is presented. A genetic algorithm with dual mutation is developed to solve such a constrained optimization problem. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed solution methodology.