Dr. Neeraj Goyal

This paper proposes an efficient approach for reliability evaluation of multiple-sources and multiple-destinations flow networks. The proposed approach evaluates multiple node pair capacity related reliability. The proposed approach is a three-step approach; in the first step, it enumerates network minimal cut sets. These network minimal cut sets are then used to enumerate subset cuts in the second step. Third step involves the evaluation of multiple node pair capacity related reliability from the enumerated subset cuts using a multi-variable inversion sum-of-disjoint set approach. The proposed approach can be used for optimal network design as it combines multiple performance requirements, that is, flow requirements between multiple node pairs and network reliability, in a single criterion.

A general assumption made in evaluation of flow network reliability is perfectly reliable nodes. Under such assumption, network reliability is evaluated through subset cut or composite path set approaches. This paper presents a simple approach to account for node failures in reliability evaluation of flow networks using subset cut approach. The proposed approach starts with generating combinations of nodes of the network and utilizes subset cuts (with perfect nodes) to find the valid additional subset cuts due to imperfect nodes. These additional subset cuts consist of only nodes or nodes-links combinations. To illustrate efficacy of the proposed approach, computational results on various benchmarks networks are provided. The proposed method is applicable to evaluate additional minimal cut sets due to imperfect nodes from minimal cut  sets (with perfect nodes) for networks considering only connectivity as the success criteria or additional subset cut set for networks with multiple node pair capacity requirements.

The recent paper published in IJPE by Tripathy et al. [1] presented a new method based on self-generating, non-redundant and disjoint cutsets to evaluate the three important reliability measures, viz., two-terminal, all-terminal and k-terminal. Authors claim that their algorithm is much more efficient as it saves the overhead of disjointing process and redundant terms removal than the existing Sum-of-Disjoint-Product (SDP) form based algorithms available in the literature. However, we observe several discrepancies in the results generated by their proposed algorithm on the considered benchmark networks and even on the illustrative example taken to describe the algorithm.

Read more: http://www.ijpe-online.com/november-2014-p9-comments-on-an-efficient-method-based-on-self-generating-disjoint-minimal-cut-sets-for-evaluating-reliability-measures-of-interconnection-networks.html#ixzz3keM93dT2