Faster Exact Reliability Computation

High reliability guarantees are a prerequisite for any critical infrastructure. In complex systems, the computation of the probability to provide a service is difficult and hence time consuming. To this end, this article presents an improved method for exact reliability computation by exploiting the existence of articulation points in graphs representing the dependency function such systems. Evaluated on generalized block graphs with many articulation points, this method provides a speed-up of 50% to 85% in general. When the network does not contain articulation points, the overhead in memory and computation time is negligible in comparison to an existing method.