RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF A FLOW NETWORK WITH MULTIPLE-CAPACITY LINK-STATES

摘要

Many real-world complex systems such as computer communication networks, transport systems of a large town and hydraulic systems which carries gas or fluid through pipeline networks can be regarded as flow networks. The reliability of such a flow network is denned as the probability of transmitting the required amount of flow successfully from the source node to the terminal node, and can be computed in terms of composite paths each of which is a union of simple paths of the network. This paper proposes a method to evaluate the reliability of an undirected flow network with multiple-capacity link-states. The proposed method is based on the expanded minimal paths defined in the text, which are generated from the given set of minimal paths of the network, and the composite paths are then generated in terms of those paths.