A New Technique for Generating Minimal Cut Sets in Nontrivial Network

Abstract

Network reliability analysis problem is the center of many scientific productions. It consists of evaluating the all-terminal reliability of networks. Two classes have emerged; exact and approximate methods. The aim of this paper is to present an efficient exact method for enumerating minimal cuts (MCS) of R-networks. The algorithm proceeds by determining minimal paths set (MPS) and from which minimal cuts are generated by managing binary decision diagrams. The manipulation process consists of a series of transformations, reductions and filtering operations. The approach succeeds in the reduction of computation time and memory space and was applied for evaluating the reliability of a national radio communication network.