Study on the Covering Problem in Network Reliability for Precision Business Management

A new research area namely, precision business management, is quietly blooming through network theory. In precision business management, several new management tools can be developed to precisely adjust the behavior of the entities in the company to satisfy the management requirement. This paper deals with the situation when specific business process pattern should be recognized, and the related entities in the process have to be identified. It is referred to a kind of covering problem in network reliability. Minimal path set can be considered as a set of flow combinations. However, in some cases, a subset of the flow combination may be required for applications. Therefore, techniques for dealing such cases are needed. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to solve the covering problem in network reliability. Some numerical examples are presented for explanation. The results show that the cases are interesting in the discussion.