LAUSR

Assessing the reliability of a multistate flow network (MFN) has been significantly attractive in recent years. Generally, some assumptions such as budget or time limits are considered in this problem to make it more realistic. Considering the cost constraint, the network reliability at level [Formula: see text] is the probability of transmitting at least [Formula: see text] units of product from a source node to a destination node through the network within the cost of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is a given demand value. Here, the problem of reliability evaluation of an MFN with cost constraint in terms of minimal cuts is considered. Presenting some techniques to improve the solution, a simple improved algorithm is proposed to address the problem. The complexity results are provided which demonstrate our proposed algorithm to be more efficient than some other existing ones in the literature. Some numerical comparisons between our MATLAB implementation of the proposed algorithm here and a recently proposed one are made. This way, computational comparative results on three benchmarks and a thousand random test problems are provided in the sense of performance profile introduced by Dolan and Moré, which show our proposed algorithm to be more efficient than the other.