Robustness analysis is a natural merger of reliability analysis and geometrical strength analysis using strain techniques. This analysis provides a more complete and detailed description of a network's deformation because it takes into account three independent deformation measures: robustness in scale, shape and local rotation. In this paper, the Maximum-Displacement-Vector Approach (MDVA) is presented to simplify the computation of these deformation measures. To discern the features of one approach from the other, the equivalence test is proposed to examine a network as a whole for the statistical equalities between two sets of deformation measures generated by individual approaches. To verify the relationship between the redundancies of the observations and those of the deformations, we expanded the deformation vector equation. Several methods have been used in this study to improve the level of robustness. We tested robustness analysis technique by applying it to the second-order GPS network in the mid-western region of Taiwan. The results obtained from this study reveal that those methods significantly improve the robustness level of the Taiwan GPS network.