Novel Binary-Addition Tree Algorithm for Reliability Evaluation of Acyclic Multistate Information Networks

Abstract Acyclic multistate information network (AMIN), a variant of multistate information network (MIN) that is not dependent on the conservation laws of flow, plays an important role in the current-day network communications because many modern network structures are based on AMIN, e.g., social networks, local area networks (LANs), and 4G/5G networks. An effective evaluation of the network reliability of an AMIN serves as a major and primary metric for determining the performance and quality of the overall network. The network reliability, which was shown to be NP-hard, has been successfully resolved by the universal generation function method (UGFM). However, the UGFM can only address small-scale problems owing to the limitations of the current-day computer memories. To overcome this problem, an improved and enhanced binary-addition tree algorithm (BAT) is proposed in this study to effectively evaluate and analyze the reliability of the AMIN. The performance of the proposed BAT is validated via a few examples.