Proactive fault handling for system availability enhancement

Proactive fault handling combines prevention and repair actions with failure prediction techniques. We extend the standard availability formula by five key measures: (1) precision and (2) recall assess failure prediction while failure handling is gauged by (3) prevention probability, (4) repair time improvement, and (5) risk of introducing additional failures. We give a short survey of actions that are suited to be combined with failure prediction and provide a procedure to estimate the five key measures. Altogether, this allows to quantify the impact of proactive fault handling on system availability and may provide valuable input for system design.