Recently, INFORMS Journal on Computing has published online the research成果 by Associate Professor Feng Jianguang from the School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University, entitled "Exact MILP Models for Redundancy Allocation with Mixed Components". Associate Professor Feng Jianguang is the first author, and Professor Che Ada is the corresponding author of the paper. This study focuses on the Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) in system design, which aims to maximize system reliability by properly allocating redundant components under limited resources. For scenarios involving heterogeneous components and complex structures, this research proposes a stepwise linearization method for nonlinear reliability functions and constructs multiple exact Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models. A tree-based representation is adopted to drastically reduce the number of decision variables and constraints in the models. Computational results demonstrate the high efficiency of the developed models and methods. Especially for large-scale complex systems, they exhibit robustness and scalability, and significantly outperform existing branch-and-bound approaches.

INFORMS Journal on Computing is the official journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). It is a top journal in the field of optimization and operations research, and one of the 24 leading academic journals for business schools (UTD24) selected by the University of Texas at Dallas.

About the speaker:Feng Jianguang is an Associate Professor at the School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University. His main research focuses on theories and methods of combinatorial optimization for the operations management of complex systems. He has presided over one Youth Project and one General Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. His research papers have been published in journals including INFORMS Journal on Computing, European Journal of Operational Research, International Journal of Production Research, OR Spectrum, and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. He has received the Second Prize of Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award and the First Prize of Outstanding Scientific and Technological Research Achievements in Shaanxi Universities.

(Written by:Feng Jianguang Reviewed by:Jia Ming)