Multicriteria reasoning considering reliability or availability

Reliability and/or availability are increasingly important aspects in the design of systems, especially networks and service offerings. Optimization here is a multi-criteria process finding the right compromise between cost and quality. At the same time, results should be explored online, either as part of interactive, user-centric design tools or for Web based service negotiation. In this paper we consider a generic method for multi-criteria optimization based on reliability/availability graphs, but also provide a more specialized solution for dealing with the widely used reliability/availability block diagrams. Initial experiments show that the techniques can be applied to realistic problem sizes from the literature.