Galves A., Gaudel M. C.
Rare Events in Stochastic Dynamical Systems and
Failures in Ultra-Reliable Reactive Programs
(47K, Plain TeX)

ABSTRACT.  This paper presents a model of reactive process-control programs as stochastic
processes. This makes it possible to prove that the law of the first failure
time in a ultra-reliable reactive program is approximately exponential. This
fact is usually assumed on the basis of a constant probability of failure and
the independence of the successive inputs.  These hypotheses {\sl a priori},
do not hold for reactive process-control programs.  Our result provides a
rigourous justification of the exponential assumption for a large class of
ultra-reliable reactive programs.