A new simulation method based on the RVR principle for the rare event network reliability problem.

In this paper we consider the evaluation of the well known [InlineEquation not available: see fulltext.]- network unreliability parameter by means of a new RVR Monte-Carlo method. This method is based on series-parallel reductions and a partitioning procedure using pathsets and cutsets for recursively changing the original problem into similar ones on smaller networks. By means of several experimental results, we show that the proposed method has good performances in rare event cases and offers significant gains over other state-of-the-art variance reduction techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]