Availability and performability analysis for a service degradation process with condition-based preventive maintenance I – formulation and optimisation. (1st January 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Dohi, Tadashi
• Is Part Of: International journal of strategic engineering asset management. Volume 2 Number 1(2014)
• Page Start: 80
• Page End: 97
• Publication Date: 2014-01-01
• Subjects: software service -- service degradation -- software rejuvenation -- condition-based maintenance -- semi-Markov decision process -- optimality -- control-limit policy; Facility management -- Periodicals; Plant engineering -- Periodicals; 658.2005
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1759-9733

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.