Proceedings of the
The 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023)
3 – 8 September 2023, Southampton, UK
A New Method for Reliability Evaluation of Two-Terminal Multistate Networks in Terms of d-Minimal Cuts
Laboratory of Science and Technology on Integrated Logistics Support, College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, China.
ABSTRACT
Many real-world complex systems can be modelled by multistate networks. Theoretically, the evaluation of multistate network reliability is NP-hard. Therefore, it is essential to develop more efficient methods to analyse the reliability of practical multistate networks. There are mainly direct and indirect methods for evaluating reliability. In this paper, we focus on the third stage of the indirect method which is calculating the union probability of the events given all d-minimal cuts (d-MCs). Based on the reliability evaluation method proposed by Provan and Ball (1984) on binary networks, this study attempt to develop its extended version for the multistate network scenario. The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by illustrative example and several benchmark networks.
Keywords: Reliability, Multistate network, Two-terminal network, d-MC, MC.
