A New Edge Ordering Heuristic in Network Reliability Analysis

The Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs), as an efficient data structure for representing and manipulating Boolean functions, have been proven to be useful in network reliability analysis. The application of OBDD needs heuristic to order the edges before processing. Depth-First Search (DFS) and Breadth-First Search (BFS) are two widely-used heuristics for edge ordering. With the increasing complexity of the real-world networks, these heuristics might not meet the performance requirements. In this paper, we proposed a novel edge ordering heuristic named ´Snooker´ by using the degrees of nodes as the ordering parameter. The performance of BFS and Snooker heuristics is compared, and experimental data shows that Snooker heuristic significantly outperforms the BFS heuristic.