Abstract
In this article, a special node called the k - -out-of-n node, which cannot receive more than a certain amount of flows, is newly introduced. The acyclic multistate-node network (AMNN) that unsatisfied the flow conservation law is then extended to the k-out-of-n AMNN by including the k - -out-of-n and k + -out-of-n nodes. A very simple universal generating function method (UGFM) based on some intuitive properties that characterize the structure of the k-out-of-n AMNN is developed to solve the k-out-of-n AMNN reliability. The correctness of the proposed UGFM will be analyzed and proven. An example with three special cases illustrates how the k-out-of-n AMNN reliability is evaluated using the proposed UGFM. To show that the proposed UGFM can also solve the AMNN reliability, the first case of the example demonstrates that the proposed UGFM without needing to remove redundant terms and collecting like terms is more efficient and reasonable than the best-known UGFM. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.