Expanding a complex networked system for enhancing its reliability evaluated by a new efficient approach

Abstract

The economic development and social well-being of a society are highly dependent on many complex networked systems, such as power transmission and distribution, telecommunications, transportation and so forth, which calls for the enhancement of their reliable functioning. To fulfil this purpose, the first essential step is to effectively evaluate their reliability, which is intractable since they usually contain a large amount of components organized via complex structures. To deal with this computational complexity, this research proposes a new network reliability evaluation approach by identifying minimal path sets that may have edges in common, but consist of only parallel and series structures when considered together. Our proposed approach can efficiently approximate network reliability more precisely than the existing edge-packing methods. We then propose a multi-objective optimization approach to solve the problem of expanding a complex networked system to enhance its reliability. The solutions obtained by our proposed approach can help in well understanding the trade-off between the reliability and cost of network expansion solutions. Finally, an application of the proposed method to the high-speed railway network of China is implemented.