A Particle Swarm Optimization Approach Based on Monte Carlo Simulation for Solving the Complex Network Reliability Problem

Reliability optimization has been a popular area of research, and received significant attention due to the critical importance of reliability in various kinds of systems. Most network reliability optimization problems are only focused on solving simple structured networks (e.g., series-parallel networks) of which the reliability function can be easily obtained in advance. However, modern networks are usually very complex, and it is impossible to calculate the exact network reliability function by using traditional analytical methods in limited time. Hence, a new particle swarm optimization (PSO) based on Monte Carlo simulation (MCS), named MCS-PSO, has been proposed to solve complex network reliability optimization problems. The proposed MCS-PSO can minimize cost under reliability constraints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use PSO combined with MCS to solve complex network reliability problems without requiring knowledge of the reliability function in advance. Compared with previous works to solve this problem, the proposed MCS-PSO can have better efficiency by providing a better solution to the complex network reliability optimization problem.