Reliability simulation of component-based software systems

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Abstract
Prevalent Markovian and semi-Markovian methods to predict the reliability and performance of component-based heterogeneous systems suffer from several limitations: they are subject to an intractably large state-space for more in- volved scenarios, and they cannot take into account the in- fluence of various parameters such as reliability growth of the individual components, dependencies among the com- ponents, etc., in a single model. Discrete-event simulation on the other hand offers an attractive alternative to analyt- ical models as it can capture a detailed system structure, and can be used to study the influence of different factors separately as well as in a combined fashion on dependabil- ity measures. In this paper we demonstrate the flexibility offered by discrete-event simulation to analyze such com- plex systems through two case studies, one of a terminating application, and the other of a real-time application with feedback control. We simulate the failure behavior of the terminating application with instantaneous as well as ex- plicit repair. We also study the effect of having fault-tolerant configurations for some of the components on the failure behavior of the application. In the second case of the real- time application, we initially simulate the failure behavior of a single version taking into account its reliability growth. Later we study the failure behavior of three fault tolerant systems, viz., DRB, NVP and NSCP, which are built from the individual versions of the real-time application. Results demonstrate the flexibility offered by simulation to study the influence of various factors on the failure behavior of the applications for single as well as fault-tolerant configura- This work was done when the author was a graduate student at Duke University

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