USE OF WEIBULL FAULT PROCESSES IN MODELING FAULT TOLERANT SYSTEMS.

The Weibull process is a well-accepted representation of component failure processes in fault tolerant systems. However, special problems arise in the use of this representation in modeling ultrareliable systems. We have proposed a technique wherein the difficulties encountered are handled by a finite Taylor series expansion of the integral representation of coverage, followed by a careful analysis of the error term. The small number of terms in the expansion allows the approximation to be computationally fast, and the error analysis provides a tight bound on the error in the approximation.