An approximate approach for reliability evaluation of a multistate flow network in terms of minimal cuts

Abstract

An approximate approach, based on exact methods, is proposed to assess reliability of the multistate flow networks in terms of minimal cuts (MCs). The method selects some MCs to remove from the reliability evaluation process, reducing the computing cost and resulting in a very good approximation. Several benchmarks have been employed to show the efficiency of the proposed technique. The numerical experiments show that at times our approach finds even the exact solution more than 3 or 4 times faster, and in other cases it obtains a very good approximation more than 114 times faster than the available exact algorithms in the literature.