A heuristic method of link reliability assignment for maximal reliability
Abstract Link reliability assignment is the problem of determining the reliability values to be assigned to the various links of a given network from a given set of link reliability values in order to achieve maximum reliability for the given network. Reliability to be maximized may be the s-t reliability or global reliability. The methods available for assigning reliability values to various links require the knowledge of the network reliability function and its several evaluations. The proposed method, which is heuristic in nature, does not require the reliability function and its evaluations; it only needs the network s-t paths (or trees for global reliability). Frequencies of occurrence of various links in paths of different cardinalities (or trees for global reliability) are found. An index, termed the importance index, which is a function of frequency of occurrence, number of paths and cardinalities of paths, is defined and determined for each link. Links are assigned reliability values in the same order as the order of importance index values. The proposed criterion has been tried on several networks. The network reliability obtained is maximal.