METHOD FOR EVALUATING ALL THE MINIMAL CUTS OF A GRAPH.

A technique is introduced to determine all minimal cuts for all the sink nodes in a nonplanar network. The algorithm uses a subset method and an iterative process to achieve high efficiency. For an N-sink node network there are (2**N-1) possible combinations of nodes (nonempty subsets). These subsets are checked against several criteria to see if they can be transformed into minimal cutsets. An iterative process is used to generate these nonempty subsets efficiently so that the number of subsets to be checked is about (2**N-1)/2. Since this algorithm generates all the minimal cutsets for all nodes in one operation, it is faster than conventional methods that compute them for one sink node at a time. Tests using random graphs showed a small CPU time per minimal cutset.