Abstract
Many real-world systems (such as cellular telephones, transportation, etc.) are multistate information networks (MINs) that do not satisfy the flow conservation law. Current methods for evaluating MIN reliability are derived from universal generating function methods (UGFMs). Unfortunately, the existing known UGFM has two significant flaws. 1) Each individual term is required to be transformed into a graph to verify its feasibility. 2) The method fails to determine the real reliability. Hence, a novel revised UGFM is developed to solve the general MIN reliability problem with the same time complexity as that of the existing known UGFM. © 2011 IEEE.