Reliability of a Mechanical System with k-out-of-n Subsystems

Redundancy allocation problems having more general form for finding the optimal solutions has been demonstrated in the present paper. Different redundancy options offer enhanced capabilities in formulating the problem to accommodate k-out-of-n subsystems. Maximizing the system reliability given system-level constraints with the selection of the components and the redundancy levels is the objective. In view of this maximizing the system reliability having k-out-of-n subsystems becomes important with respect to cost and weight constraints. Determination of the system reliability by computing the stage reliabilities and the component reliabilities forms an integrated reliability model. Lagrange's method of undetermined multipliers is used in the present paper to find system reliability with the help of stage reliabilities and the component reliabilities. Also an attempt of using Random Search Technique for global optimization (RST) has been applied to find system and component reliabilities for comparison