Download or read book A MULTI-AGENT BASED APPROACH FOR SOLVING THE REDUNDANCY ALLOCATION PROBLEM written by Zhuo Li and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) is a well known mathematical problem for modeling series-parallel systems. It is a combinatorial optimization problem which focuses on determining an optimal assignment of components in a system design. Due to the diverse possible selection of components, the RAP is proved to be NP-hard. Therefore, many algorithms, especially heuristic algorithms were proposed and implemented in the past several decades, committed to provide innovative methods or better solutions. In recent years, multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed for modeling complex systems and solving large scale problems. It is a relatively new programming concept with the ability of self-organizing, self-adaptive, autonomous administrating, etc. These features of MAS inspire us to look at the RAP from another point of view. An RAP can be divided into multiple smaller problems that are solved by multiple agents. The agents can collaboratively solve optimal RAP solutions quickly and efficiently. In this research, we proposed to solve RAP using MAS. This novel approach, to the best of our knowledge, has not been proposed before, although multi-agent approaches have been widely used for solving other large and complex nonlinear problems. To demonstrate that, we analyzed and evaluated four benchmark RAP problems in the literature. From the results, the MAS approach is shown as an effective and extendable method for solving the RAP problems.