Abstract
General measure in the reliability is the k-terminal reliability, which is the probability that the specified vertices are connected by the working edges. To compute the k-terminal reliability components are usually assumed to be statistically independent. In this study the modeling and analysis of the k-terminal reliability are investigated when dependency among components is considered. As the size of the network increases, the number of the joint probability parameter to represent the dependency among components is increasing exponentially. To avoid such a difficulty the structured-event-based-reliability model (SERM) is presented. This model uses the combination of the network topology (physical representation) and reliability block diagram (logical representation). This enables us to represent the dependency among components in a network form. Computational algorithms for the k-terminal reliability in SERM are based on the factoring algorithm Two features of the ractoring algorithm are the reliability preserving reduction and the privoting edge selection strategy. The pivoting edge selction strategy is modified by two different ways to tackle the replicated edges occuring in SERM. Two algorithms are presented according to each modified pivoting strategy and illustrated by numerical example.
