A novel global harmony search algorithm for reliability problems

Inspired by the swarm intelligence of particle swarm, a novel global harmony search algorithm (NGHS) is proposed to solve reliability problems in this paper. The proposed algorithm includes two important operations: position updating and genetic mutation with a small probability. The former enables the worst harmony of harmony memory to move to the global best harmony rapidly in each iteration, and the latter can effectively prevent the NGHS from trapping into the local optimum. Based on a large number of experiments, the proposed algorithm has demonstrated stronger capacity of space exploration than most other approaches on solving reliability problems. The results show that the NGHS can be an efficient alternative for solving reliability problems. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.