The failure of electronic components is one of the relevant reasons for breakdowns in the automotive domain today. The number of breakdowns that could be traced back to bugs in the electronic system has increased to 55 percent. Analysts expect a further increase of electronically induced breakdowns of up to 60 percent in 2004 [1]. However, sustainable innovations in the automotive industry are ...

We consider the problem of estimating via simulation the tails of the performability of a system. Traditional simulation is ine cient in this case because the number of samples required to obtain an adequate characterization of the tails is very large. The system we consider is the M/M/1/K system subject to server breakdowns and repairs. This system is simple, but has the characteristics shared...

Deteriorations, increasing costs and burdens of maintenance work as well as recent collapses of civil engineering structures underscore the need for robust, cost-effective structural health monitoring (SHM) strategies. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of a multi-agent software paradigm for a self-managing structural health monitoring system. As will be highlighted in...

Transient analysis of non-Markovian Stochastic Petri nets is a theoretically interesting and practically important problem. In this paper, we first present a method to compute bounds and an approximation on the average state sojourn times for a subclass of deterministic and stochastic Petri nets (DSPNs) where there is a single persistent deterministic transition that can become enabled only in ...

Today’s CPUs consume a significant amount of power and generate a high level of heat, requiring an active cooling system to support reliable operations. These CPUs avoid thermal breakdowns–in case of cooling system failures–through frequency-throttling mechanisms at the expense of a large performance penalty. In this paper, we first develop and validate a systemwide thermal model that can accou...

Improving memory utilization is important for improving the efficiency of a cloud datacenter by increasing the number of usable VMs. Memory over commitment is a common technique for this purpose. Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) is a technique to improve the utilization by sharing identical memory pages to reduce the total memory consumption. For a cloud datacenter, we might expect TPS will reduc...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we find that the cooperative value function does not exhibit smooth pasting at the efficient cut-off beli...