Efficient transient simulation of failure/repair Markovian models

Simulation methods for the solution of the extremely large Markovian dependability models which result from complex fault-tolerant computer systems have recently been developed. The author presents efficient simulation methods for the estimation of transient reliability/availability metrics for repairable fault-tolerant computer systems which combine estimator decomposition techniques with an efficient importance sampling technique. Comparison with simulation methods previously proposed for the same type of metrics and models shows that the proposed methods are orders of magnitude faster