An Exact Enumeration Method to Find d-MPs in Multistate Networks
The enumeration approaches are important topics in network reliability calculation. For general purposes, the explicit enumeration (EE) is the popular method to apply. However, the low-cost feature of EE sacrifices its efficiency. A great improvement of EE is the invention of fast enumeration (FE), which creates a low-cost way of general purpose enumeration method with very good efficiency for applications. But for the enumeration in network reliability calculation, the optimal number of enumerations can be shown to be [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the number of minimal paths and [Formula: see text] is the demand of flow. FE still has the complexity far greater than the optimal one. This paper proposes an exact enumeration method for network reliability calculation, which has the complexity no greater than [Formula: see text]. This method greatly improves the enumeration efficiency than FE. So, it is believed to be very valuable to the large real-life applications. Benchmarks are made to show the efficiency of the proposed method.