Adaptive statistical algorithms in network reliability analysis

The paper is concerned with introducing novel algorithms, such as adaptive approximation and deterministic radial basis function (RBF) method, for calculating the average loss (AL). Different approximators are trained to approximate the loss function and, after a short learning period, AL can be evaluated analytically with fast calculations. An improvement of the Li-Silvester (LS) method is also presented which yields a sharper lower bound on AL. The efficiency of the new methods are proven by theoretical analysis as well as demonstrated by excessive simulations. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.