An Improved State-Space Decomposition Method for Reliability Evaluation of Multistate Networks

In this paper, an improved state space decomposition (SSD for short) method is proposed to evaluate the reliability of multistate networks with all the minimal path vectors (d-MPs for short). Existing SSD methods all select a proper d-MP which minimizes the value of a given function. When there is a tie during the process, the tie is broken arbitrarily. However, we find that different d-MPs with same function value affect the efficiency of the decomposition procedure, which ultimately lead to different computation times. We introduce a heuristic method called Rl to select d-MP when there is a tie. The results of comparative experiments show that the proposed heuristic method can significantly enhance the efficiency of current SSD algorithm for reliability evaluation of multistate networks.