Efforts can be made to reduce life cycle costs and improve equipment availability. This is not only an issue of (company) low-maintenance costs and high availability, but can also be a big challenge “under battlefield conditions.” One key condition is finding a reasonable division of line replaceable units (LRUs). Usually, for such division, the only key factor is the cost of equipment maintenance support. But this approach can lead to some misleading results if other additional factors aren’t considered, for example, maintainability, supportability, reliability, testability, maintenance support, and equipment design. The last two factors--maintenance cost H(x) and equipment development cost C(t)--are the point of reference in this paper.

The authors propose a linear model (described in section 2) that takes into account some minor component costs. The goal is to solve this high-dimensional, large-scale optimization model via a genetic algorithm (section 3, figure 2). A coding strategy is also proposed with a fitness function. To compare the obtained results with reality, section 4’s case study presents the crankshaft linkage mechanism of a diesel engine. Moreover, 0-1 integer programming is used to further test algorithm efficiency. All obtained results are mutually consistent, and the proposed genetic algorithm optimization is confirmed.

For readers interested in new genetic algorithms and their practical applications, this paper is very promising. As a final result, we have a new, proven division method with application to product LRU division.