Ant Colony Optimization for Component Assignment Problems in Circular Consecutive-k-out-of-n Systems

The Circular Consecutive-k-out-of-n (Cir/Con/k/n) system consists of n components arranged in a circular sequence and each component has different reliability. The purpose of optimization is to obtain an optimal assignment which can make the Cir/Con/k/n system most reliable. As the number of components n increases, the computation time for the optimization of Cir/Con/k/n system will increase considerably. In this paper, we propose applying the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to obtain quasi optimal assignments for such problems. First of all, we describe the basic principles and the operation procedures of ACO through pseudo code. After that, a large number of simulation experiments on different types of systems and components are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the ACO. The results of simulation experiments demonstrate the advantage of ACO in the optimization of Cir/Con/k/n system.