An improved algorithm for reliability evaluation of flow networks

Many real-world systems such as power transmission and distribution systems, computers and communication, social networks, and so on can be modeled as flow networks which makes the problem of reliability evaluation of such networks of great importance. As transmission time and cost play essential roles in many realistic flow networks, both time and budget constraints are of essential significance and considered in this work. We propose an improved algorithm that computes the exact probability of transmitting d units of data from a source to a destination through one single path within T units of time and the budget of b. The algorithm is illustrated through a benchmark network example. The complexity results are provided. A rather large-sized benchmark, Pan European topology, along with one thousand randomly generated test problems, are used to generate the experimental results, which clearly show the superiority of our proposed algorithms to some existing algorithm in the literature.