Quality evaluation of an international business system by applying network approaches

For a single-commodity stochastic-flow network, the system reliability is the probability that the maximum flow is larger than or equal to a given demand. It is an important performance index to measure the quality level of a real-life system. In a two-commodity stochastic-flow network, different types of commodities are transmitted through the same network simultaneously and compete for the capacities. We concentrate on the reliability problem for such a network subject to the budget constraint. This paper defines firstly the system capacity as a pattern and proposes a new performance index. A simple algorithm based on minimal cuts is proposed to generate all maximal vectors meeting the demand and budget constraints. The performance index can then be computed in terms of all such maximal vectors.