A Pruned Tree Approach to Reliability Computation

This paper presents a new algorithm for computing network terminal reliability from a set of paths or cut-sets. Topics include the general problem, past approaches, the algorithm of this paper, efficiency comparisons with other methods, and extensions to s-dependent failures. An appendix contains a program listing with comments. The algorithm is based on selective generation of relevant states, via mechanisms for choosing and pruning branches of a binary tree. The method is easy to implement and to understand, and has proved in practice to be more efficient than the fastest methods published heretofore.