摘要
Different types of networks, such as, Internet of Things, social networks, wireless sensor networks, transportation networks, and 4g/5G serve to benefit and help our daily lives. The multistate flow network (MFN) is used to model the network structures and applications. The level d reliability, R d , of the MFN is the success probability of sending at least d units of integer flow from the nodes 1 to n and is a popular index for designing, managing, controlling, and evaluating MFNs. The traditional indirect algorithms must have all d-MPs (special connected vectors) or (d-1)-MCs (special disconnected vectors) first, and then use inclusion-exclusion technique (IET) or sum-of-disjoint product (SDP) in terms of found d-MPs or (d-1)-MCs to calculate R d . The above four procedures are all NP-Hard and null and cannot calculate R d for d = 1, 2, …, d MAX simultaneously, that is, they can only calculate R 1 , R 2 , …, and R d MAX sequentially. Thus, in this study a novel algorithm is proposed to calculate the R d directly for all d simultaneously, eliminating the need of using the above four procedures. The time complexity and demonstration of the proposed algorithm were analyzed with suitable examples. Furthermore, an experiment was conducted on 12 benchmark networks to validate the proposed algorithm.