A Hybrid Metaheuristic for the Series-parallel Redundancy Allocation Problem in Electronic Systems of the Ship

The redundancy allocation problem (RAP) is a famous NP.complete problem that has beenstudied in the system reliability area of ships and airplanes. Recently meta-heuristic techniques have been applied in this topic, for example, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search. In particular, tabu search (TS) has emerged as an efficient algorithmic approach for the series-parallel RAP. However, the quality of solutions found by TS depends on the initial solution. As a robust and efficient methodology for the series-parallel RAP, the hybrid metaheuristic (TSA) that is a interactive procedure between the TS and SA (simulated annealing) is developed in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, SA is used to find the diversified promising solutions so that TS can re-intensify search for the solutions obtained by the SA. We test the proposed TSA by the existing problems and compare it with the SA and TS algorithm. Computational results show that the TSA algorithm finds the global optimal solutions for all cases and outperforms the existing TS and SA in cases of 42 and 56 subsystems.