An Improved Method of Evaluation of Network Reliability with Variable Link-Capacities

We propose a new method to evaluate the network reliability which greatly reduces the intermediate steps toward calculations of maximum capacity flow by excluding unnecessary simple paths contained in the set of failure simple paths. By using signed simple paths and signed flow, we show that our method is more efficient than that of Lee and Park (2001a) in the number of generated composite paths and in the procedure for obtaining minimal success composite paths. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the use and the efficiency of the method.