Abstract :
To provide a true mission-level reliability and readiness evaluator, a software package referred to as FASTER (fault tolerant architecture simulator tool for evaluating reliability and readiness evaluator) was developed. FASTER is able to evaluate mission workload changes, duty cycle effect, reconfiguration, and subsystem criticality. FASTER can account for the above as well as active and standby redundancy, imperfect switching and diagnostics, multiphase missions, and various maintenance and repair methods. FASTER uses a Monte Carlo approach to compute several reliability figures of merit which include, but are not limited to, reliability, availability, mean time to critical failure, and mean time to repair
