Two-commodity reliability evaluation of a stochastic-flow network with varying capacity weight in terms of minimal paths

A real-life manufacturing system can be modeled as a stochastic-flow network in which nodes stand for the machine stations, and arcs stand for the shipping media. In terms of minimal paths (MPs), this paper presents a stochastic-flow network model with four characteristics: (1) both nodes and arcs have multiple possible capacities, and may fail; (2) each component (arc/node) has both capacity and cost attributes; (3) two-commodity are proceeded; and (4) the capacity weight varies with arcs, nodes, and types of commodity. We study the possibility of two-commodity to be transmitted through this network simultaneously under the budget constraint. Such a possibility is named as the system reliability. The MPs play the role of media to describe the relationship among flow assignments and capacity vectors. Subsequently, a simple algorithm, in terms of MPs, is proposed to evaluate the system reliability. From the capacity management and decision making viewpoints, managers may adopt the system reliability as a performance index to measure the system capacity and finally to determine if it meets the customers’ orders or not.