Evaluating Network Reliability and 2-Edge-Connected Reliability in Linear Time for Bounded Pathwidth Graphs

Abstract.

This paper presents a decomposition method for computing the 2-edge-connected reliability of undirected networks. This reliability is defined as the probability that all the vertices of a given graph G are 2-edge-connected, when edges fail independently with known probabilities. The principle of this method was introduced by Rosenthal in 1977 [1]. For the all terminal reliability problem it consists in enumerating specific state classes of some subnetworks. These classes are represented by the partitions of the boundary sets. For the 2-edge-connected reliability problem these classes are represented by labeled forests whose nodes are the partition blocks and some ``unidentified'' blocks. Our implementation uses a vertex linear ordering. The computational complexity depends on the number of classes, which depends on the vertex separation number of a given vertex linear ordering. Our computational results show the efficiency of this method when the vertex separation number is smaller than 7.