System design optimization with mixed subsystems failure dependencies

Systems present dependencies among their components failure behavior, which impact their ultimate avail-ability. Previous works addressed the optimal design of systems in relation to its cost and under given availability constraint, considering identical subsystems failure dependencies. The present paper addresses this problem in a realistic scenario by taking into consideration mixed subsystems failure dependencies. The problem is formulated with reference to a complex bridge network system and a series-parallel system. Three nature-inspired optimi-zation techniques are implemented to solve the problem, namely differential evolution (DE), manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO), and shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) with constraint handling. A numerical eval-uation is performed; the results show that DE outperforms MRFO and SFLA.