Recent advances in optimal reliability allocation

Reliability has become a greater concern in recent years, because high-tech industrial processes with ever increasing levels of sophistication comprise most engineering systems today. To keep pace with this rapidly developing field, this paper provides a broad overview of recent research on reliability optimization problems and their solution methodologies. In particular, we address issues related to: 1) universal generating-function-based optimal multistate system design; 2) percentile life employed as a system performance measure; 3) multiobjective optimization of reliability systems, especially with uncertain component-reliability estimations; and 4) innovation and improvement in traditional reliability optimization problems, such as fault-tolerance mechanism and cold-standby redundancy-involved system design. New developments in optimization techniques are also emphasized in this paper, especially the methods of ant colony optimization and hybrid optimization. We believe that the interesting problems that are reviewed here are deserving of more attention in the literature. To that end, this paper concludes with a discussion of future challenges related to reliability optimization. © 2007 IEEE.