Allocation and sequencing in 1-out-of-N heterogeneous cold-standby systems: Multi-objective harmony search with dynamic parameters tuning

A redundancy allocation is a famous problem in reliability sciences. A lot of researcher investigated about this problem, but a few of them focus on heterogeneous 1-out-of-N: G cold-standby redundancy in each subsystem. This paper considers a redundancy allocation problem (RAP) and standby element sequencing problem (SESP) for 1-out-of-N: G heterogeneous cold-standby system, simultaneously. Moreover, here, maximizing reliability of cold-standby allocation and minimizing cost of buying and time-independent elements are considered as two conflict objectives. This problem is NP-Hard and consequently, devizing a metaheuristic to solve this problem, especially for large-sized instances, is highly desirable. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective harmony search. Based on Taguchi experimental design, we, also, present a new parameters tuning method to improve the proposed algorithm. - Graphical abstract: Example of solution encoding. - Highlights: • This paper considers a redundancy allocation and standby element sequencing problem. • To solve this problem, a multi-objective harmony search algorithm is proposed. • Dynamic parameters tuning method is applied to improved the algorithm. • With this method, sensitivity of the algorithm to initial parameters is reduced.