Redundancy allocations in a system with many stages

Abstract

For a large system, optimum allocation of redundancy becomes tedious and sometimes difficult to manage with the existing methods. Where simple formulation or solution technique is available, the solution is generally approximate. On the other hand, with exact formulation and exact solution procedure, the excessive amount of work involved is such as not to permit the handling of large systems. The present paper initially uses a simple formulation and a simple solution technique to arrive at an approximate solution, and later obtains an exact solution using a search method. This procedure keeps the effort required for an exact solution to a minimum and is therefore applicable to large problems. The approach is independent of the type of constraints. An example is provided to illustrate the various steps of the procedure.