Architectural dependability evaluation with Arcade

This paper proposes a formally well-rooted and extensible framework for dependability evaluation: Arcade (architectural dependability evaluation). It has been designed to combine the strengths of previous approaches to the evaluation of dependability. A key feature is its formal semantics in terms of input/output-interactive Markov chains, which enables both compositional modeling and compositional state space generation and reduction. The latter enables great computational reductions for many models. The Arcade approach is extensible, hence adaptable to new circumstances or application areas. The paper introduces the new modeling approach, discusses its formal semantics and illustrates its use with two case studies.