Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
A consecutive-2 graph is a graph where each vertex is associated with a failure probability and the graph is considered failed if any two adjacent vertices both fail. Recently, the problem of computing reliability for general consecutive-2 graph was shown to be #P-complete while polynomial algorithms exist for trees. In this paper, we give a linear time algorithm for a class of graphs including forests and cycles.
For a given set of failure probabilities qi, the assignment of qi to the vertices of a given graph is optimal if it maximizes the reliability of that graph. It is known that optimal assignments for trees require messy computations while linear algorithms exist for lines and stars. In this paper, we prove that the optimal reliability of any n−tree is bounded between those of an n−line and an n−star.