A mixed software rejuvenation policy for multiple degradations software system

Abstract

Software rejuvenation is a preventive and proactive technology to counteract the phenomenon of software aging and system failures, and to improve the system reliability. In this paper we present a mixed software rejuvenation policy for an operational software system with multiple degradation states, which considers both the history information and the current running state. By this policy, the system is rejuvenated when it achieves to a degradation threshold or it comes to the pre-determined rejuvenation interval. For comparison, standard rejuvenation policy is also discussed. Continuous-time Markov chains are used to describe the multiple degradation states model. To evaluate these polices expediently, we utilize deterministic and stochastic Petri nets (DSPN) to solve the models. Numerical results show that the deployment of software rejuvenation in the system leads to significant improvement in availability and throughput. And the mixed rejuvenation policy is better than the standard rejuvenation policy. © 2009 IEEE.