A PROCEDURE FOR SOLVING GENERAL INTEGER PROGRAMMING-PROBLEMS

Recently, Misra [Microelectron. Reliab. 31, 285-294 (1991)] introduced a procedure for solving a variety of reliability optimization problems. In the present paper, the authors demonstrate that this procedure can also be used for solving a general class of integer programming problems, which are usually encountered in many allocation problems. System reliability design is only one of the applications. The algorithm, while being simple, has been found to be an economical and exact solution to the integer programming problem. The algorithm solves a very wide variety of the problems which otherwise cannot be easily solved through any of the existing search methods. Several illustrations are provided to establish the superiority of the approach.