Response Surface Analysis Of Stochastic Network Performance

This paper describes a response surface approach to the stochastic network improvement problem. The network addressed in this study is acyclic, simple, and directed; and, is characterized by single commodity flow from multiple sources to multiple sinks. The network is stochastic in that the reliability of network components is described by a binary distribution of operative or failed states, where P/sub Si/ is the ith component's probability of survival. A new class of control variables is introduced to reduce the variance of the maximal flow estimators.