Economic reliability analysis

Modern commercial enterprises face the vexing problem of increasing system services and capacity to a larger number customers who demand greater reliability and lower costs. In particular, greater corporate and individual reliance on commercial software and telecommunication services, along with the general economic slowdown, have placed phenomenal pressures on most economic sectors.; Current business strategies to control costs typically deal with financial elements. This level of granularity may be sufficient from an accounting standpoint, but it precludes one from understanding and validating the economic effectiveness of the expenditures being made. Moreover, better methods of relating revenues and costs to system topologies, components and operations would provide a means to forecast the economic impact of proposed system changes while these changes are being planned.; This dissertation extends traditional Reliability models into a general Economic Reliability Analysis [ERA] framework that will include financial elements such as: revenues, lost revenues, and investment periods along with system reliability, design and cost elements. All of the elements of this framework are specified along with its' processes. This framework is applied to two small example networks whose framework elements are fully specified. The results of these framework processes are analyzed and evaluated for ‘usefulness.’; The ERA framework is extensible and incorporates a variety of reliability techniques to address a variety of system reliability problems. This framework is used in conjunction with simulation techniques and applied to two example networks. Markov reward models are incorporated into the framework and applied to a hardware/software hybrid system. In addition, two case studies are presented. The first case study combines network reliability bounding tools with the ERA framework to estimate the economic efficiency of an operational network and its components. The second case study applies software reliability models with the framework to evaluate a hypothetical banking software system. The intent of these examples is to apply the framework to a set of common system reliability problems and demonstrate the usefulness of the framework to provide an economic interpretation along with the reliability analysis.; The ERA framework applies an engineering discipline to the measurement and management of system costs within a given operational environment through the identification of the underlying processes that produce economic worth. This framework provides general guidelines and specific insights for System Reliability, Finance and System Design. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...