There are usually multiple types of products with similar functions available on the market, and the price of a product depends on its functionality and reliability. For some industrial systems whose components are functionally exchangeable, different component procurement plans and assignment plans lead to different system reliability and procurement cost. The objective of multi-type component assignment problem (MCAP) is to search the optimal assignment of multiple types of components to the positions of a system for maximizing the system reliability. However, in the existing studies on MCAPs, a particular position can be assigned at most two types of components and the budget constraint has not been taken into consideration. This work studies a new type of MCAPs in which a particular position can be assigned multiple types of components, develops the mathematical model of the MCAP with budget constraint, and proposes a Birnbaum importance (BI)-based two-stage heuristic to solve the budget-constrained MCAP. The proposed method is applied to a real-world fuel service system of marine engines to show its feasibility and practicability.
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