Optimal Redundancy for Reliability in Series Systems

This paper considers the problem of determining the optimal number of redundant components in order to maximize the reliability of a series system subject to multiple resource restrictions. After formulating and solving an associated zero-one programming problem by a branch-and-bound procedure, the paper shows that the optimal solution to the associated problem is equivalent to the optimal solution for the optimal redundancy problem. Finally, the paper shows that this technique solves fairly large problems with multiple constraints without excessive storage-space requirements.