Modeling software systems with rejuvenation, restoration and checkpointing through fluid stochastic Petri nets

In this paper, we present a Fluid Stochastic Petri Net (FSPN) based model which captures the behavior of aging software systems with checkpointing, rejuvenation and self-restoration, three well known techniques of software fault tolerance. The proposed FSPN based modeling framework is novel in many aspects. First, the FSPN formalism itself is extended by adding flush-out arcs. Second, the three techniques are simultaneously captured in a single model for the first time. Third, the formalism enables modeling dependencies of the three techniques on various system features such as failure, load and time in the same framework. Further, our base FSPN model can be viewed as a generalization of most previous models in the literature. We show that these FSPNs can not only mimic previously published models but can also extend them. For one FSPN model, we present numerical results to illustrate their usage in deriving measures of interest.