All-terminal network reliability optimization via probabilistic solution discovery

This paper presents a new algorithm that can be readily applied to solve the all-terminal network reliability allocation problems. The optimization problem solved considers the minimization of the network design cost subject to a known constraint on all-terminal reliability by assuming that the network contains a known number of functionally equivalent components (with different performance specifications) that can be used to provide redundancy. The algorithm is based on two major steps that use a probabilistic solution discovery approach and Monte Carlo simulation to generate the quasi-optimal network designs. Examples for different sizes of all terminal networks are used throughout the paper to illustrate the approach. The results obtained for the larger networks with unknown optima show that the quality of the solutions generated by the proposed algorithm is significantly higher with respect to other approaches and that these solutions are obtained from restricted solution search space. Although developed for all-terminal reliability optimization, the algorithm can be easily applied in other resource-constrained allocation problems. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.