Hierarchical reliability evaluation of large networks

Introduces a hierarchical approach for computing the terminal reliability between any given source-destination pair in large networks. The main advantage of the proposed method is the possibility of breaking down the problem of terminal reliability to subproblems. The technique gives an exact reliability expression for a hierarchical network and an approximation for any large network. The usefulness of the strategy is demonstrated by several examples of large and hierarchical networks. The effect of partitioning a large network into a number of clusters, on the reliability figure and the execution time is also investigated