Reconnguring Distributed Systems Using Markov-decision Models

When reconnguring distributed systems, either because failures and/or repairs have occurred, or because the workload requirements have changed over time, an alternative connguration has to be selected, thereby taking performability and costs, i.e., quality of service, requirements into consideration. In this paper we will present the use of Markov-decision models to decide upon such reconngurations. This seems to be a promising approach when the number of possible alternative conngu-rations is limited. In that case, reconngurations can be prepared well, so that the actual decision process during the real-system operation can be performed pretty fast.