Optimization with different redundant hydraulic pipelines

Anotace: This paper uses an ant system (AS) meta-heuristic optimization method to solve the problem of hydraulic structure optimization systems. We consider the case where redundant hydraulic pipelines are chosen to achieve a desirable level of reliability. The hydraulic pipelines of the system are characterized by their cost, capacity and reliability. The reliability is defined as the ability to satisfy the water consumer demand which is represented as a piecewise cumulative load curve. The proposed meta-heuristic seeks for the optimal configuration of series-parallel systems in which a multiple choice of hydraulic pipelines are allowed from a list of product available in the hydraulic market. Our approach has the advantage to allow hydraulic pipelines elements with different parameters to be allocated in hydraulic systems. To allow fast reliability estimation, a universal generating function method is applied.