Approximate method to evaluate reliability of complex networks

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of reliability evaluation in complex networks, in which both link and node failures are considered, and proposes an approximate method based on the minimal paths between two specified nodes. The method requires an algorithm for transforming the set of minimal paths into a sum of disjoint products (SDP). To reduce the computation burden, in the first stage, only the links of the network are considered. Then, in the second stage, each term of the set of disjoint link-products is separately processed, taking into consideration the reliability values for both links and adjacent nodes. In this way, a reliability expression with a one-to-one correspondence to the set of disjoint products is obtained. This approximate method provides a very good accuracy and greatly reduces the computation for complex networks.