G-SSASC: Simultaneous simulation of system models with bounded hazard rates

The real utility of simulation lies in comparing different design choices by evaluating models represented using a simulation framework. In an earlier paper, we presented the Simultaneous Simulation of Alternative System Configurations (SSASC) simulation algorithm, which provides a methodology to exploit the structural/stochastic similarity among the alternative design configurations in an efficient manner that evaluates multiple alternative configurations of a system design simultaneously. However, this technique was limited to Markovian models. In this paper, we propose G-SSASC, which expands the domain of system models that can be modeled and evaluated to those non-Markovian models that have distributions with bounded hazard rates. We also show that we obtain a speed-up of up to an order of magnitude for a case study model that evaluates the reliability of a storage system.