This program uses a rule-oriented language to automatically generate input files for the SURE program. The ASSIST user describes the failure behavior and recovery behavior of a fault-tolerant computer system in an abstract language. The ASSIST program then automatically generates a corresponding semi-Markov model. The abstract language allows efficient description of large, complex systems. A one-page ASSIST-language description may result in a semi-Markov model with thousands of states and transitions. The ASSIST program also provides model-reduction techniques to facilitate efficient modeling of large systems.
An open source version of ASSIST (named WinASSIST) is available: visit here.
Executable Code for Linux system for the SURE/ASSIST programs is available in "Linux_sure-assist.tar.gz". A new experimental version for PCs running Linux is also available there.
The following program documentation is available for ASSIST:
A detailed tutorial on modeling with ASSIST and SURE is available (postscript):Johnson, Sally C.; and Boerschlein, David P.: ASSIST User Manual. NASA technical memorandum 4592, August 1995.
Johnson, Sally C.: Reliability Analysis of Large, Complex Systems using ASSIST. In AIAA/IEEE 8th Digital Avionics Systems Conference, San Jose, California, Oct. 1988.
Butler, Ricky W.: An Abstract Language for Specifying Markov Reliability Models. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, vol. R-35, no. 5, Dec. 1986, pp. 595--601.
Ricky W. Butler and Sally C. Johnson, Techniques for Modeling the Reliability of Fault-Tolerant Systems With the Markov State-Space Approach , NASA RP-1348, September 1995, pp. 130
Last modified: 6 April 2001 (11:35:37)