An efficient terminal-pair reliability algorithm for network management

Terminal-pair reliability in network management determines the probabilistic reliability between the two nodes of a network, given failure probabilities of all links. The problem has been successfully solved by the path-based partition method, network reduction technique, and the combination of the two. The path-based partition algorithm, however, requires the repeated execution of a path-search procedure in an attempt to locally minimize the total number of subproblems generated. This paper proposes a cut-based partition algorithm based on the minimum cut separating the source from the remaining network nodes. This cut-based algorithm makes no attempt to locally minimize the number of subproblems, but greatly reduces the computation time for the partitioning of each subproblem. Experimental results show the superiority of the cut-based algorithm over the path-based algorithm especially for complex networks. By further employing the network reduction technique, this cut-based partition algorithm outperforms the path-based partition algorithm for all benchmarks and random sparse or dense networks