Optimum reliability design of a system containing mixed redundancies

A nuclear power plant generally consists of subsystems that may employ any of the partial, standby and active redundancies. The design of such a mixed redundancy system under some techno-economic constraints, is quite important in order to achieve specific objectives. Often the design objective is to maximize the system reliability under the given constraints (mainly the cost constraint). In the present paper an algorithm is described which makes the solution of this mathematically difficult problem possible. The algorithm has been found powerful and efficient to solve such a design problem. Some examples are demonstrated. To achieve further efficiency a study was organized and the recommendations for obtaining a minimum solution time, are provided.