A Cutsets-Based Unified Framework to Evaluate Network Reliability Measures

This paper presents a minimal cutsets-based unified framework to evaluate some commonly used reliability measures: $g$-terminal, 2-terminal, and $k$-terminal reliability. In doing so, the paper proposes a single algorithm, which generates the network node sets. From these node sets, depending on the reliability measure(s), only those node sets are kept, which contains at least one node from the specified node set. These selected node sets form link-minimal cutsets. These minimal cutsets are used as an input to multi-variable inversion-based sum-of-disjoint product approach to obtain the unreliability expression thereafter. By solving several network examples of varied complexities, the comparison with the existing approach is provided.