LARGE-SCALE NETWORK ANALYSIS WITH APPLICATIONS TO COMMUNICATION NETWORKS, TRANSPORTATION NETWORKS AND INFERENCE NETS

Abstract

This thesis discusses some aspects of the analysis and design of large-scale networks. There are two objectives. First, the notion of algebraic network is used to model different network problems that have some common characteristics. In particular, the semiring network and its variants are described. Following this, some applications of the algebraic network model are presented. Another objective for this study is to implement some network algorithms in APL. This language is used because it can handle matrix and array operations quickly. In this respect, two concrete examples of the semiring network, the transportation networks and flow networks, are studied. The last type of networks, inference nets, is not a semiring network in general, but in studying these networks, we can see how the techniques used for the earlier examples of semiring networks can be adapted for the inference nets