Redundancy Allocation of Components with Time-Dependent Failure Rates

The Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) is well-known in the field of reliability optimization. In this paper, RAP is investigated assuming that the distribution of the time to failure of the components has the form of an Erlang distribution with a time-dependent rate parameter and considering that the choice of redundancy for each subsystem can be none, active, standby or mixed. A genetic algorithm is used to solve the problem of optimal allocation. To analyze the effect of the time dependence, some numerical examples are worked out. Then, a case study of RAP from the literature is analyzed. The obtained results show that time dependence of the failure time distribution parameters can lead to significant differences in the optimal redundancy allocation.