This research presents an approach based upon ant-colony optimization to address the system reliability problem. For each component of a system, the number of units in parallel needs to be chosen to maximize the reliability for the entire system. As more parallel units are selected, costs increase in a proportional fashion. For this effort, quantity discounts for additional parallel units are considered, and the budget for purchase of parallel units is limited. Ant colony optimization methodology is employed to find an optimal system reliability that satisfies the budget constraint. The methodology is employed for several test problems, and near-optimal solutions are found.
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