Reduction Methods on Probabilistic Control-flow Programs for Reliability Analysis

Modern safety-critical systems are heterogeneous, complex, and highly dynamic. They require reliability evaluation methods that go beyond the classical static methods such as fault trees, event trees, or reliability block diagrams. Promising dynamic reliability analysis methods employ probabilistic model checking on various probabilistic state-based models. However, such methods have to tackle the well-known state-space explosion problem. To compete with this problem, reduction methods such as symmetry reduction and partial-order reduction have been successfully applied to probabilistic models by means of discrete Markov chains or Markov decision processes. Such models are usually specified using probabilistic programs provided in guarded command language. In this paper, we propose two automated reduction methods for probabilistic programs that operate on a purely syntactic level: reset value optimization and register allocation optimization. The presented techniques rely on concepts well known from compiler construction such as live range analysis and register allocation through interference graph coloring. Applied on a redundancy system model for an aircraft velocity control loop modeled in SIMULINK, we show effectiveness of our implementation of the reduction methods. We demonstrate that model-size reductions in three orders of magnitude are possible and show that we can achieve significant speedups for a reliability analysis.