Network Reliability Optimization

This chapter presents design of reliable networks. The exact calculation of any general network reliability measure is NP-hard. Therefore, network designers have been reluctant to use reliability as a design criterion. However, reliability is becoming an important concern to provide continuous service quality to network customers. The chapter discusses various network reliability measures and efficient techniques to evaluate them. Two genetic algorithms are presented to demonstrate how these techniques to estimate and compute network reliability can be incorporated within an optimization algorithm. Computational experiments show that the proposed approaches significantly reduce computational effort without compromising design quality.