The reliability of a gas distribution network: A case study

In this paper we take one of the cutting edge algorithms for computing the all-terminal reliability and the k-terminal reliability of a network and use it to compute the reliability of a real life gas distribution network in the Netherlands. To do this we estimate network properties using industry knowledge and combine several different techniques to make the problem computable. This is the first time known to us that these techniques have been applied to a large, in this case over 20000 nodes, real life network. Besides this, we show the versatility of this pathwidth-based dynamic programming algorithm by suggesting some powerful but simple modifications and argue that this network is representative for other distribution networks.