A Simple Heuristic Algorithm for Generating All Minimal Paths

Evaluating network reliability is an important topic in the planning, designing, and control of network systems. In this paper, an intuitive heuristic algorithm is developed to find all minimal paths (MP) by adding a path, or an edge into a network repeatedly until the network is equal to the original network. The proposed heuristic algorithm is easier to understand & implement than the existing known heuristic algorithm. Without generating any duplicate MP, it is also more efficient. The correctness of the proposed algorithm will be analysed, and proven. One bench example is illustrated to show how to evaluate the network reliability using the proposed heuristic algorithm.