Sharif Digital Repository

In recent decades, multistate two-terminal reliability problem has attracted several researchers, and accordingly many exact and approximation approaches have been proposed in the literature in terms of minimal cuts (MCs) or minimal paths (MPs) to address this problem. Here, an MP-based approximation approach is developed based on exact algorithms. With all the MPs at hand, the approach rearranges the MPs ascendingly with respect to their lengths and then sets the flow on some MPs to be zero which turns to reduce the computing cost in solving the problem. We provide the complexity results, and by employing some benchmarks and one thousand randomly generated networks illustrate that not only... 

There are several exact or approximating approaches that apply {m d}-MinCuts (d-MCs) to compute multistate two-Terminal reliability. Searching for and determining d-MCs in a stochastic-flow network are important for computing system reliability. Here, by investigating the existing methods and using our new results, an efficient algorithm is proposed to find all the d-MCs. The complexity of the new algorithm illustrates its efficiency in comparison with other existing algorithms. Two examples are worked out to show how the algorithm determines all the d -MCs in a network flow with unreliable nodes, and in a network flow of moderate size. Moreover, using the d-MCs found by the algorithm, the...