A novel method for the network reliability in terms of capacitated-minimum-paths without knowing minimum-paths in advance

Many real-world systems (such as electric power, transportation, etc.) may be regarded as flow networks whose arcs have independent, discrete, limited and multivalued random capacities. In this study, a novel method for the network reliability is presented. Analysis of the proposed algorithm and comparison to existing best-known algorithms shows that the proposed method has the following advantages: (1) it is just based on the special property of capacitated-minimum-paths (CMPs) of which the max-flow in these paths are all equal to a given capacity (say d) and can be used to search for all capacitated minimum-paths without knowing all minimum-paths in advance; (2) it is simple and more effective in finding CMP candidates than the existing methods and (3) the proposed method is easier to understand and implement.