Abstract. This paper investigates optimal allocation of reduncancy in a mixed system with n stages in series where components are in parallel at each stage. The method described in this paper gives stonger convergence criteria and finds optimal solutions which may be nonintegral and can then be used to generate optimal integral solutions in polynomial time.

Received: March 13, 2011

AMS Subject Classification: 90C99

Key Words and Phrases: redundancy allocation, nonlinear integer programming, reliability optimization, polynomially bounded algorithms,unimodular matrices

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