Evaluating recovery aware components for grid reliability

Abstract

Failure in grids is costly and inevitable. Existing fault tolerance (FT) mechanisms are typically defensive and reactive, thus unnecessarily costly. In this paper we propose a hybrid FT approach, recovery aware component (RAC), combining reactive and proactive FT, with failure recovery or aversion of user-defined granularity, by component-orientation and architecture-level reasoning about FT, to increase reliability and availability without needless performance sacrifices. We model and analyse a parameterised RAC implementation combining prediction, proactive rejuvenation and reactive restarting to varying extents, calculating cost savings, reliability improvements and cost-benefit, under parameters such as prediction frequency and accuracy.