Optimal reliability allocation of heterogeneous components in pharmaceutical production plant

The COVID-19 pandemic and competitiveness pressure the pharmaceutical companies to acquire systems designed to be as reliable as possible. The present paper aims to optimize the design of a pharmaceutical plant through the reliability allocation of heterogeneous components under the design constraints. The problem is solved by resorting to three nature-inspired algorithms of artificial intelligence (AI): grey wolf optimizer (GWO), shuffled frog-leaping algorithm (SFLA), and adaptive particle swarm optimization (ADAP-PSO). A penalty function is implemented to handle the constraints and the results obtained are compared.