A Philosophy for Allocating Component Reliabilities in a Network

A philosophy for developing an algorithm to compute collectively the required reliabilities of the components in a network so as to satisfy the specified reliabilities of an arbitrary number of source-destination pairs is presented. This philosophy involves the formulation and solution of an entropy maximization problem. The resulting algorithm is easy to implement and can become a very valuable tool for estimating network component reliability requirements quickly. If the number of components whose reliabilities are to be computed becomes extremely large, so that the solution of the corresponding entropy maximization problem becomes difficult, the algorithm can be applied iteratively to generate results.