Reliability analysis of complex networks based on irredundant subset cut group

This paper presents a unified framework to analyze the performance of a complex network containing diversified link capacities with specified flow requirement in terms of Capacity Related Reliability (CRR). An efficient minimal cutset based methodology is proposed to enumerate irredundant subset cut groups (SCGs) to evaluate flow networks reliability. The proposed approach is a two-step process. The first step requires a prior knowledge of all minimal cutsets of the network along with an enumeration of all irredundant subsets of cutset group (SCG) from a cut matrix to block or allow a prescribed amount of flow. In the second step, the enumerated SCGs can be fed as input to any multi-variable inversion sum-of-disjoint-product (MVI-SDP) based reliability evaluation algorithm to obtain the CRR of the network. The versatility of the proposed approach is that a single framework can be used to evaluate all the reliability measures such as 2-terminal, k-terminal and all-terminal. Various benchmark networks available in literature have been used to analyze the performance of the proposed methodology in terms of complexity and time constraint.