A Fast and Accurate ASP Counting Based Network Reliability Estimator

The quantification of system reliability is fundamental to the assessment of a system’s safety and resilience, and has been of interest to decision-makers. Since quantifying the system reliability is shown to be computationally intractable, researchers aim to find approximations. Existing approaches to approximate reliability either suffer from poor scalability or lack of correctness guarantees. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a powerful tool for knowledge representation that can specify complex combinatorial problems. In recent years, the new applications of ASP have propelled the emergence of well-engineered ASP systems. This paper proposes a new ASP counting based framework, RelNet-ASP, to approximate or estimate the reliability of a system or network. The framework reduces the problem of reliability estimation to an approximate model counting problem on ASP programs, offering formal guarantees of the estimated reliability. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that RelNet-ASP outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both runtime performance and accuracy.