Development of a software tool for reliability estimation

This thesis presents Version 2.0 of Software Tool for Reliability Estimation (STORE 2.0). It expands on the work done by Parekh [1] by revising the algorithm for tie-set and cut-set calculation, by including fault tree reliability analysis, by analyzing state dependent system, and by integrating component and system reliability analysis.;This thesis also presents an approach to the simplification of complex systems by collapsing series and parallel components into a sub-system. The approach was illustrated on an example described by Nelson et al. [2]. The example had 16 components resulting in ten cut-sets and fifty five tie-sets. Upon simplification, the problem was reduced to one tie-set only.;STORE 2.0 integrates parameter estimation, component reliability analysis, system reliability analysis, estimation of reliability of state dependent systems, and fault tree analysis. It was verified and validated on several examples taken from the open literature. The software was developed in Visual Basic 2008 with SQL as the database

A Tabu Search Heuristic for a Generalized Quadratic Assignment Problem

The generalized quadratic assignment problem (GQAP) is the task of assigning a set of facilities to a set of locations such that the sum of the assignment and transportation costs is minimized. The facilities may have different space requirements, and the locations may have varying space capacities. Also, multiple facilities may be assigned to each location such that space capacity is not exceeded. In this paper, an application of the GQAP is presented for assigning a set of machines to a set of locations on the plant floor. Construction algorithms and a simple tabu search heuristic are developed for the GQAP. A set of test problems available in the literature was used to evaluate the performances of the TS heuristic using different construction algorithms. The results show that the simple TS heuristic is effective for solving the GQAP