Network reliability and the probabilistic estimation of damage from fire spread

Abstract

An efficient generalization of Shanthikumar's upper bound on two-terminal reliability is developed, that leads to efficient methods for the probabilistic assessment of damage from fire spread and other invasive hazards in segmented structures. The methods exploit a basic relationship between the fire spread problem and the probability of reachability in communications networks. The upper bound employs noncrossing cuts of the network.