An Experimental Comparison of the Heuristic Methods for Solving Reliability Optimization Problems

This paper compares three heuristic methods (Nakagawa-Nakashima, Gopal-Aggarwal-Gupta, Sharma-Venkateswaran) for solving reliability optimization problems with nonlinear constraints. Their effectiveness, measured in terms of computation time, optimality rate, and relative error, is evaluated on several sets of randomly generated test problems with nonlinear constraints for series systems. A FORTRAN program for generating the test problems and best known solutions (some of them are exact optimal) are included.