Decomposition Technique for Integrated Dependability Evaluation of Hardware-Software Systems Using Stochastic Activity NetworksYudi Purwantoro, Stuart BennettDependability evaluation is useful and important in designing computer systems, while at the same time it is also difficult. The difficulty becomes significant when the model combines hardware, software and their interactions due to the difference in failure behavior between hardware and software.An approach to simplify the integrated evaluation of dependability is proposed using a structured, top-down technique based on decomposition of system function in several levels. The sub-functions are then modeled using stochastic activity networks in terms of hardware, software and interaction. This in turn decomposes the system into components. The complete model is composed of the subnets of the sub-functions.