ABSTRACT
Network reliability concerns reliability metrics of large classes of multicomponent systems. In general, the structure of such a system is represented by a binary function of M binary variables where M is the number of components. There are different ways of specifying a structure function. The chapter is concerned with the most widely known class of models, sometimes called stochastic graphs or simply networks. They are very useful, in particular, for communication network analysis. For instance, fault trees are another similar and widely used description tools. There is a wide field of applications of network reliability techniques. The chapter discusses on some basic exact computing methods, and focuses on techniques used to attempt a reduction in the size of the model. The idea is to develop low cost simplifications that can be applied as preprocessors, in order to reduce the size of the original problem.
