The Mercury Environment: A Modeling Tool for Performance and Dependability Evaluation

Abstract

It is important to be able to judge the performance or dependability metrics of a system and often we do so by using abstract models even when the system is in the conceptual phase. Evaluating a system by performing measurements can have a high temporal and/or financial cost, which may not be feasible. Mathematical models can provide estimates about system behavior and we need tools supporting different types of formalisms in order to compute desired metrics. The Mercury tool enables a range of models to be created and evaluated for supporting performance and dependability evaluations, such as reliability block diagrams (RBDs), dynamic RBDs (DRBDs), fault trees (FTs), stochastic Petri nets (SPNs), continuous and discrete-time Markov chains (CTMCs and DTMCs), as well as energy flow models (EFMs). In this paper, we introduce recent enhancements to Mercury, namely new SPN simulators, support to prioritized timed transitions, sensitivity analysis evaluation, several improvements to the usability of the tool, and support to DTMC and FT formalisms.