Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY
Volume 66, Issue 2, Pages 258-280Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TR.2017.2684785
Keywords
Availability; cascading failures; Markov processes; reliability modeling; trees
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [CMMI-0926949, CMMI-1200065]
- NJIT Provost Undergraduate Summer Research program
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We devise efficient algorithms to construct, evaluate, and approximate a Markovian dependability system with cascading failures. The model, which was previously considered by Iyer et al., represents a cascading failure as a tree of components that instantaneously and probabilistically fail. Constructing the Markov chain presents significant computational challenges because it requires generating and evaluating all such possible trees, but the number of trees can grow exponentially in the size of the model. Our new algorithm reduces runtimes by orders of magnitude compared to a previous method devised by Iyer et al. Moreover, we propose some efficient approximations based on the idea of most likely paths to failure to further substantially reduce the computation time by instead constructing a model that uses only a subset of the trees. We also derive two new dependability measures related to the distribution of the size of a cascade. We present numerical results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approaches. For a model of a large cloud-computing system, our approximations reduce computation times by orders of magnitude with only a few percent error in the computed dependability measures.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available