Publications Details
A mathematical foundation for the development of cut sets for arbitrarily interconnected networks
This report documents a new method for computing all-terminal reliability for networks that cannot be described in terms of a physical or logical hierarchy--so-called arbitrarily interconnected networks. The method uses an efficient search algorithm to generate minimal cut sets for nonhierarchical networks directly from the network connectivity diagram without the construction of a fault tree model. The efficiency of the search algorithm can be attributed in large part to the novel cut set quantification scheme developed for this project. This quantification scheme uses cut sets composed only of link failures to compute the reliability of a network in which arbitrary combinations of nodes and links can fail. The scheme further enables the computation of traditional risk importance measures for nodes and links from these same link-based cut sets. This novel quantification scheme leads to a dramatic reduction in the computational effort required to assess network reliability because the cut set search process (the most computationally intensive part of the assessment) can neglect the possibility of node failures when finding cut sets to describe all-terminal reliability. Computational savings can be several orders of magnitude over previous cut set-based network reliability assessment methods. The method is applicable to both planar and nonplanar networks.