Optimal resource assignment to maximize multistate network reliability for a computer network

Computer network is a major tool to transmit data in our modern society. How to evaluate and enhance network reliability is thus an important issue for organizations, especially to maximize network reliability. A computer network is a multistate network in which each edge has several possible capacities with a probability distribution and may fail. The multistate network reliability is the probability that the maximal flow is no less than a given demand. From the standpoint of quality management, a further problem is to reassign the existing resources for maximizing multistate network reliability without changing the network topology. Hence, this paper focuses on the resource assignment problem to propose an efficient approach based on the simple genetic algorithm. In which, a resource assignment is represented as a chromosome and the corresponding multistate network reliability is the fitness value of the chromosome. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can derive the optimal resource assignment in a reasonable time.