Reliability allocation for improving the robustness of an engineering system

A robust engineering system is capable of maintaining its high reliability against various uncertainties. This favorable system feature can be achieved by wisely selecting and allocating components in the system. We propose a design strategy to select and allocate candidate components to maximize the system reliability robustness when the system structure is given. The strategy assesses the reliability robustness of each component by considering the uncertainty in the parameter estimates of the component's reliability model and the operating conditions. The results are incorporated into the system optimization using a genetic algorithm (GA). The proposed strategy is shown to be realistic and efficient in solving such type of reliability allocation problems.