Efficient Reliability Block Diagram Evaluation Through Improved Algorithms and Parallel Computing
Quantitative reliability evaluation is essential for optimizing control policies and maintenance strategies in complex industrial systems. While Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs) are a natural formalism for modeling these hierarchical systems, modern applications require highly efficient, online reliability assessment on resource-constrained embedded hardware. This demand presents two fundamental challenges: developing algorithmically efficient RBD evaluation methods that can handle diverse custom distributions while preserving numerical accuracy, and ensuring platform-agnostic performance across diverse multicore architectures. This paper investigates these issues by developing a new version of the librbd open-source RBD library. This version includes advances in efficiency of evaluation algorithms, as well as restructured computation sequences, cache-aware data structures to minimize memory overhead, and an adaptive parallelization framework that scales automatically from embedded processors to high-performance systems. Comprehensive validation demonstrates that these advances significantly reduce computational complexity and improve performance over the original implementation, enabling real-time analysis of substantially larger systems.
Authors
- Gloria Gori (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8482-2612)
- Marco Papini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8887-7437)
- Alessandro Fantechi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4648-4667)
Institutions
- University of Florence (IT)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Applied Sciences
- Published
- 2025-10-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/app152111397
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Real-Time Systems Scheduling
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.27