Multicriteria redundancy optimization using an efficient search procedure

An efficient approach to multiple criteria redundancy optimization problem, often encountered in reliability design of engineering systems, is presented. A search technique introduced earlier (Misra 1991) in combination with multicriteria optimization methods, based on the min-max concept for finding the Pareto optimal solution of multicriteria optimization problems, provides an efficient and excellent approach for solving redundancy optimization problems. The approach is illustrated through several numerical examples. Based on this approach, a very general computer code called efficient search multi-objective programming (ESMOP) has also been developed. It is capable of considering any type of redundancy, constraint or individual cost function and thus offers a solution to many reliability design problems.