A novel layer-by-layer recursive decomposition algorithm for calculation of network reliability

Abstract

Efficient and exact network reliability calculation is required in a timely manner to ensure continued and reliable operation of the infrastructure networks after natural or man-made disasters. Previous studies have found that binary decision diagram (BDD) based algorithms are more efficient in dealing with network reliability computation. However, the BDD-based algorithm needs to store all the generated BDD nodes, there is still a memory overflow problem due to the limited memory space. In this paper, a new layer-by-layer recursive decomposition algorithm is proposed, and it only needs to store no more than twice of the largest BDD nodes in the same layer of all layers, and these are only a small part of all the BDD nodes in the BDD-based algorithm. The algorithm proposed in this paper is not only efficient, but also takes up less storage space. Based on a personal computer with 16 G of memory, when the target network has tens of thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of variables, the proposed algorithm only takes up a small amount of storage resources, but the BDD-based algorithm has caused memory overflow problems. The experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.