SDP algorithm for network reliability evaluation

This paper addresses the issue of the two-terminal reliability evaluation of medium-to-large networks and proposes a new method to solve the problem of ‘sum of disjoint products’ (SDP) algebraically. This method uses a ‘multiple variables inversion’ (MVI) technique for transforming a structure function into a sum of disjoint products which has a one-to-one correspondence with the reliability expression. The results of our method for several network models are compared with those obtained by means of other well-known MVI techniques. For large-scale networks, our method offers a better solution.