Study on the systematic approach of Markov modeling for dependability analysis of complex fault-tolerant features with voting logics

The Markov analysis is a technique for modeling system state transitions and calculating the probability of reaching various system states. While it is a proper tool for modeling complex system designs involving timing, sequencing, repair, redundancy, and fault tolerance, as the complexity or size of the system increases, so does the number of states of interest, leading to difficulty in constructing and solving the Markov model. This paper introduces a systematic approach of Markov modeling to analyze the dependability of a complex fault-tolerant system. This method is based on the decomposition of the system into independent subsystem sets, and the system-level failure rate and the unavailability rate for the decomposed subsystems. A Markov model for the target system is easily constructed using the system-level failure and unavailability rates for the subsystems, which can be treated separately. This approach can decrease the number of states to consider simultaneously in the target system by building Markov models of the independent subsystems stage by stage, and results in an exact solution for the Markov model of the whole target system. To apply this method we construct a Markov model for the reactor protection system found in nuclear power plants, a system configured with four identical channels and various fault-tolerant architectures. The results show that the proposed method in this study treats the complex architecture of the system in an efficient manner using the merits of the Markov model, such as a time dependent analysis and a sequential process analysis. & 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.