Article in Journal ART-2021-02

BibliographyBibartiu, Otto; Dürr, Frank; Rothermel, Kurt; Ottenwälder, Beate; Grau, Andreas: Scalable k-out-of-n models for dependability analysis with Bayesian networks.
In: Gardoni, Paolo (ed.): Reliability Engineering & System Safety. Vol. 210.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
pp. 1-13, english.
Elsevier Science Ltd., February 17, 2021.
ISBN: 10.1016/S0951-8320(21)00145-9.
Article in Journal.
CorporationReliability Engineering & System Safety
CR-SchemaB.8.1 (Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance)
C.4 (Performance of Systems)
KeywordsAvailability; Scalability; Voting Gate; Fault-Tree; Bayesian networks
Abstract

Availability analysis is indispensable in evaluating the dependability of safety and business-critical systems, for which fault tree analysis (FTA) has proven very useful throughout research and industry. Fault trees (FT) can be analyzed by means of a rich set of mathematical models. One particular model are Bayesian networks (BNs) which have gained considerable popularity recently due to their powerful inference abilities. However, large-scale systems, as found in modern data centers for cloud computing, pose modeling challenges that require scalable availability models. An equivalent BN of a FT has no scalable representation for the k-out-of-n (k/n) voting gate because the conditional probability table that constitutes the k/n voting gate grows exponentially in n. Thus, the memory becomes the limiting factor. We propose a scalable k/n voting gate representation for BNs, based on the temporal noisy adder. The resulting model reduces the initial exponential to polynomial memory growth without a custom inference algorithm. Previous BN implementations of the k/n voting gate could only handle around 30 input events until memory limits make inference infeasible. However, our evaluation shows that our scalable model can handle more than 700 input events per gate, making it possible to evaluate large scale systems.

Full text and
other links
PDF (2954494 Bytes)
Original Version
Copyright© 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Contactotto.bibartiu@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Distributed Systems
Project(s)Cloud Computing for the Internet of Things
Entry dateAugust 13, 2021
   Publ. Institute   Publ. Computer Science