Amended harmony search algorithm with perturbation strategy for large-scale system reliability problems

Large-scale system reliability problem is a nonconvex integer nonlinear programming problem, traditional mathematical programming methods have computation limits and can not optimize an effective solution in a reasonable time. This paper employed an amended harmony search algorithm(AHS) to solve large-scale system reliability problems. In AHS, perturbation strategy, key parameter adjustment and global dimension selection strategy are designed to balance the capability of exploitation and exploration. A comprehensive comparison is carried out to assess the search efficiency and convergence performance of AHS. Function test and large-scale system reliability case results show that AHS is superior to many previously reported well-known and excellent algorithms.