Techniques and tools for reliability and performance evaluation: Problems and perspectives

Modelling techniques and tools of the future must meet the challenges presented by today's highly demanding and schedule-oriented developing environment. With the emergence of high performance and reliability systems the problem of how to analyze such systems has become increasingly more difficult. Traditional assumptions of independent events, exponential distributions and other such “convenient" assumptions no longer model systems realistically. Nevertheless, the demand for answering performance and reliability related questions during the design process has increased. In this paper we discuss some of the issues involved in integrating modeling and design during a product development process. We present a broad range of existing techniques of systems analysis. We also describe a variety of tools that have been developed to make the analysis process simpler.