BINARY DECISION DIAGRAMS IN NETWORK RELIABILITY ANALYSIS

Many social, economical and technological structures can be abstracted in the form of networks where the vertices are the entities of the system and the edges the physical or relational links among them. One relevant property of networks that make them a preferential structure both in natural and technological systems is that the connection between any two nodes of the networks can be achieved through many redundant paths, thus making the connection intrinsically reliable. Network reliability is studied in this paper by resorting to different approaches making use of the BDD representation of Boolean functions. The related algorithms are presented and their merits and limits are briefly discussed.