Title: Availability and performability analysis for a service degradation process with condition-based preventive maintenance I - formulation and optimisation

Authors: Tadashi Dohi

Addresses: Department of Information Engineering, Hiroshima University, 1-4-1 Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8527, Japan

Abstract: The preventive maintenance is very useful to improve effectively the service availability for software systems with service degradation. In this paper, we present a stochastic model to describe an operational software system, which consists of one operating system and multiple applications and provides a service in continuous time. Two kinds of rejuvenation strategies are taken, namely reconfiguration of applications as a corrective maintenance and reinstallation of an operating system as a preventive maintenance. We derive the optimal preventive rejuvenation schedules maximising the steady-state service availability and maximising the expected reward per unit time, by means of semi-Markov decision processes. Illustrative numerical examples are presented to give decision tables on the optimal software rejuvenation policies.

Keywords: software services; service degradation; software rejuvenation; condition-based maintenance; semi-Markov decision process; optimality; control limit policy; preventive maintenance; service availability; software systems; stochastic modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSEAM.2014.063879

International Journal of Strategic Engineering Asset Management, 2014 Vol.2 No.1, pp.80 - 97

Published online: 30 Aug 2014 *

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