Reliability and availability analysis for the JPL Remote Exploration and Experimentation System

The NASA Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) Project, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has the vision of bringing commercial supercomputing technology into space, in a form which meets the demanding environmental requirements, to enable a new class of science investigation and discovery. Dependability goals of the REE system are 99% reliability over 5 years and 99% availability. In this paper we focus on the reliability/availability modeling and analysis of the REE system. We carry out this task using fault trees, reliability block diagrams, stochastic reward nets and hierarchical models. Our analysis helps to determine the ranges of parameters for which the REE dependability goal will be met. The analysis also allows us to assess different hardware and software fault-tolerance techniques.