Irrelevant Components and Exact Computation of the Diameter Constrained Reliability

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a simple graph with $|V|=n$ nodes and $|E|=m$ links, a subset $K \subseteq V$ of \emph{terminals}, a vector $p=(p_1,...,p_m) \in [0,1]^m$ and a positive integer $d$, called \emph{diameter}. We assume nodes are perfect but links fail stochastically and independently, with probabilities $q_i=1-p_i$. The \emph{diameter-constrained reliability} (DCR for short), is the probability that the terminals of the resulting subgraph remain connected by paths composed by $d$ links, or less. This number is denoted by $R_{K,G}^{d}(p)$. The general computation of the parameter $R_{K,G}^{d}(p)$ belongs to the class of $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{P}$-Hard problems, since is subsumes the complexity that a random graph is connected. A discussion of the computational complexity for DCR-subproblems is provided in terms of the number of terminal nodes $k=|K|$ and diameter $d$. Either when $d=1$ or when $d=2$ and $k$ is fixed, the DCR is inside the class $\mathcal{P}$ of polynomial-time problems. The DCR turns $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{P}$-Hard even if $k \geq 2$ and $d\geq 3$ are fixed, or in an all-terminal scenario when $d=2$. The traditional approach is to design either exponential exact algorithms or efficient solutions for particular graph classes. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, a new recursive class of graphs are shown to have efficient DCR computation. Second, we define a factorization method in order to develop an exact DCR computation in general. The approach is inspired in prior works related with the determination of irrelevant links and deletion-contraction formula.