A two-phase linear programming approach for redundancy allocation problems

Provision of redundant components in parallel is an efficient way to increase the system reliability, however, the weight, volume and cost of the system will increase simultaneously. This paper proposes a new two-phase linear programming approach for solving the nonlinear redundancy allocation problems subject to multiple linear constraints. The first phase is used to approximately allocate the resource by using a general linear programming, while the second phase is used to re-allocate the slacks of resource by using a 0–1 integer linear programming. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.