Markovian Availability Measurement and Assessement for Hardware-Software System

Abstract

It is important to take into account the trade-off between hardware and software systems when total computer-system reliability/performance are evaluated and assessed. We develop an availability model for a hardware-software system. The system treated here consists of one hardware subsystem and one software subsystem and it is assumed that the system is down and restored whenever a hardware or a software failure occurs. Especially, for the software subsystem, it is supposed that (i) the restoration actions are not always performed perfectly, (ii) the restoration times for later software failures become longer and (iii) reliability growth occurs in the perfect restoration action. The hardware and the software failure-occurrence phenomena are respectively described by constant and geometrically decreasing hazard rates. The time-dependent behavior of the system, which alternately repeats the operational state that a system is operating without failures and the restoration state that a system is inoperable and restored, is described by a Markov process. Useful expressions for several quantitative measures of system performance are derived from this model. Finally, numerical examples are presented for illustration of system availability measurement and assessment.