Evaluating Network Robustness based on Failure Event Possibility

The robustness of a network is the ability to maintain a satisfactory performance level when there may be system endogenous random failures plus possible failures caused by external attacks. A new approach for determining network robustness is presented based on the difference between the possibilistic and probabilistic network dependability estimates. Both the probabilistic and possibilistic estimates are derived here using a simple approximation method proposed by von Collani [9], but with different operations for the possibility estimate in some system structures. The proposed robustness estimation method is demonstrated for a sample of network architectures.