Reliability Evaluation of Multi-State Two-Stage Directed Network Systems by Using Combined Stochastic Process Methods and Universal Generating Function

Multi-state two-stage directed network systems can be used to model the performance of pipeline systems such as water supply network,gas supply network,oil transformation network etc..To overcome the"dimension damnation"-huge number of system states and reduce the complexity of computation in the process of reliability evaluation,a method which is based on the combination of the universal generating function (UGF) technique and random process methods is presented.A numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed method.