AN ALGORITHM FOR MULTISTATE NETWORK RELIABILITY BOUNDS AND ITS APPLICATION

摘要

Network reliability is extensively used to measure the degree of stability of the quality of infrastructure services. The performance of the network and its components degrades over time in real situations. Multistate reliability modeling that allows a finite number of different states for the network and its components is appropriate for the reliability assessment and provides a more realistic view of the network performance than the traditional binary reliability modeling. Due to the computational complexity of the enumerative methods in evaluating the multistate reliability, the problem can be reduced to search lower boundary points and use them to evaluate reliability. Lower boundary points can be used to compute exact reliability value and reliability bounds. We present an algorithm to search for lower boundary points. The proposed algorithm has considerable improvement in terms of computational effciency by significantly reducing the number of evaluations to obtain reliability bounds.