Modified MIP: A Versatile Search Procedure for Optimal Redundancy Allocation

For several decades, reliability optimization has been a topic of great interest among researchers. Many exact-solution techniques have been developed for a variety of integer programming problems arising in the reliability design of systems. Among them, Misra Integer Programming (MIP) [12] is particularly very efficient and robust. Nevertheless, it is observed that in a few cases it finds sub-optimal results. The present chapter addresses this shortcoming of the MIP algorithm. It presents a modified MIP algorithm which can satisfactorily solve all problems where the original MIP would generate sub-optimal results. The proposed algorithm possesses all capabilities of its parent version; thus, it efficiently eliminates all infeasible and many inferior feasible points, respectively, lying in the search space. Moreover, it can satisfactorily solve all variant problems in the redundancy optimization and converges economically to produce optimal results even for very large system problems.