| Abstract: | Designing reliability into a system is one of the most important objectives of a system disigner. A system normally consists of several components, and the possibility that each component is available in the market in different categories with various specifications, reliability values and costs requires serious consideration while designing a system. Therefore, the difficulty which the system designer always comes across is how to choose an appropriate combination of components so that the achieved system reliability is maximum for the given cost. The present paper aims at investigating an efficient approach which generates directly those combinations of components which guarantee the maximum system reliability at a specified cost. Also, if the system designer wants to increase his resources, the proposed method provides a way of selecting a configuration with higher reliability if it exists. Based on the developed algorithm an interactive package has been prepared, which also permits the user to exercise options such as minimum acceptable reliability value, maximum affordable cost, duty ratios for components which work for a period less than the mission time, and criticality values for components which are not fully critical. A complete example illustrating all these features is also discussed. |
