Improved novel global harmony search with a new relaxation method for reliability optimization problems

Reliability engineers often try to achieve a high reliability level of electronic systems. Reliability optimization problem involves setting reliability objectives for components or subsystems in order to meet the resource consumption constraint, e.g. the total cost, weight. The reliability optimization has been an active area of research for the past decades. In this paper, an improved novel global harmony search (INGHS) approach is proposed to solve reliability optimization problem. The INGHS employs a stochastic position updating strategy to replace the position updating of NGHS, and thus the balance between the exploration and exploitation ability further improved and more search space are observed during the algorithms’ performance. Moreover, a new constraint relaxation method also is integrated into the proposed approach. Applying the proposed approach to several well-known benchmark problems, results indicate that the INGHS algorithm can find better solution effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, the INGHS algorithm is used to solve reliability optimization problems, numerical results demonstrated that the INGHS algorithm performs better than several state-of-the-art algorithms in most cases.