In: Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Vol. 65, No. 1, pages 65-75. 1999.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an integrated reliability/availability modeling and analysis environment suitable for heterogeneous hierarchical system analysis. A key component of this environment is a high level system specification and input language which acts as a common interface to several off-the-shelf reliability modeling and analysis tools. The complexity of the underlying solvers for reliability analysis is kept transparent to the user by the design of a common language and translators to these tools. This design has several advantages including interoperability, ability of the interpreter to choose a particular solver depending on the problem characteristics. and the ease of enhancing the system capability transparent to the user. The technique, being very compact in model description, also leads to a quick analysis of the design, guiding the designers at every stage for reliable product development.
Keywords: Markov chains, availability, fault tolerant systems, fault trees, hierarchical modeling, reliability, stochastic Petri nets.