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The paper solves the redundancy allocation problem of a series-parallel system by developing and demonstrating a problem-specific ant system. The problem is to select components and redundancy levels to maximize system reliability, given system-level constraints on cost and weight. The ant system algorithm presented in the paper is combined with an adaptive penalty method to deal with the highly constrained problem. An elitist strategy and mutation are introduced to our AS algorithm. The elitist strategy enhances the magnitude of the trails of good selections of components. The mutated ants can help explore new search areas. Experiments were conducted on a well known set of sample problems proposed by D.E. Fyffe et al. (1968).