A new symbolic approach for network reliability analysis

Abstract

In this paper we propose an improved BDD approach to the network reliability analysis, that allows the user to compute an exact solution or an approximation based on reliability bounds when network complexity makes the former solution practically impossible. To this purpose, a new algorithm for encoding the connectivity graph on a Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) has been developed; it reduces the computation memory peak with respect to previous approaches based on the same type of data structure without increasing the execution time, and allows us also to derive from a subset of the minpaths/mincuts a lower/upper bound of the network reliability, so that the quality of the obtained approximation can be estimated. Finally, a fair and detailed comparison between our approach and another state of the art approach presented in the literature is documented through a set of benchmarks.