Towards Refinement and Generalization of Reliability Models Based on Component States

Complex system design often proceeds in an iterative fashion, starting from a high-level model and adding detail as the design matures. This process can be assisted by metamod-eling techniques that automate some model manipulations and check for or eliminate modeling mistakes. Our work focuses on metamodeling reliability models: we describe generalization and refinement operations for these models. Generalization relaxes constraints that may be infeasible or costly to evaluate; refinement adds further detail to produce a model that more closely describes the desired system. We define these operations in terms of operations on system constraints. To illustrate the proposed method, we relate these constraints to a common Markov chain-based reliability modeling formalism.