Reasoning about Reliability and Cost using Decision Diagrams and Syntax Trees

Reliability is an increasingly important aspect in the design of systems, especially networks and service offerings. Optimization here is a multi-criteria process finding the right compromise between cost and quality. At the same time, results should be explored online, either as part of interactive, user-centric design tools or for Web based service negotiation. In this paper we consider a generic method for multi-criteria optimization based on probabilistic graphs, but also provide a more specialized solution for dealing with the widely used reliability block diagrams. Initial experiments show that the techniques can be applied to realistic problem sizes, and that our specialized technique based on block diagrams significantly improves the generic method.