Towards Refinement and Generalization of Reliability Models Based on Component States

Abstract

Complex system design often proceeds in an iterative fashion, starting from a high-level model and adding detail as the design matures. This process can be assisted by metamodeling techniques that automate some model manipulations and check for or eliminate modeling mistakes. Our work focuses on metamodeling reliability models: we describe generalization and refinement operations for these models. Generalization relaxes constraints that may be infeasible or costly to evaluate; refinement adds further detail to produce a model that more closely describes the desired system. We define these operations in terms of operations on system constraints. To illustrate the proposed method, we relate these constraints to a common Markov chainbased reliability modeling formalism.1 In short, the transition probability matrices for consecutive-k-of-n systems are not upper triangular; for more detail, see [1, pp. 344-345].