Abstract:

This paper works on the evaluation of performability for information systems by adopting the stochastic-flow network model. To construct an information system as an information network, each arc (delivery medium) has two parameters, the bandwidth and the lead time. Consider maintenance budget and time limitation, we evaluate the performability such that a given amount of data can be delivered from the source to the sink. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (i) an algorithm integrated branch-and-bound elevating method is proposed to generate all lowest bandwidth vectors satisfying demand, maintenance budget, and time limitation. The performability is computed in terms of such vectors accordingly; (ii) the proposed algorithm is applied to a real case of Taiwan Academic Network to show the applicability and efficiency.