Towards A Framework for Multilayer Computing of Survivability

Abstract

The notion of survivability has an important position in today enterprise systems and critical functions. This notion has been defined in different ways. However, lacking a comprehensive and multilayer model for computing the survivability quantitatively, is the major gap happened in researches of this field; a model that is tally general and applicable in various applications. This research tries to design a comprehensive, multilayer as well as general model for modeling and computing the survivability. Considering that the Markov property is true in our proposed model, we used the Markov model. Using the proposed three layer architecture and designing a Markov structure, we could have been able to compute the survivability initially for each of infrastructure components separately and regardless of their functional dependency to each other. The computations were generalized to consider component dependencies as well as the upper layers entering dependencies in Markov model and could compute the survivability of each vital function for the highest architectural layer based on the underlying layers. Finally, a common and ordinary structure of crisis management has been studied and its results analyzed. We could examine the abilities of our model to compute the survivability of the whole crisis management system successfully.