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 involved scenarios, and they cannot take into account the influence of various parameters such as reliability growth of the individual components, dependencies among the components, etc., in a single model. Discrete-event simulation on the other hand offers an attractive alternative to analytical 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 dependability measures. In this paper we demonstrate the flexibility offered by discrete-event simulation to analyze such complex 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 a...

Citations