Patent ID: 7797141

Claim:
A method of assessing behavioral aspects of one or more mission systems, the method performed by a processor configured with memory, the method comprising: providing to a user a plurality of architectural components each generically representing a hardware or software system element includable in a model of a mission system; based on input from the user to a runtime environment of the processor, combining instances of the architectural components to represent hardware components and software components in a mission system model and mapping the software components to the hardware components to indicate deployment of the software components on the hardware components, to enable execution of the mission system model; based on the user input, specifying one or more amounts of resources of the hardware components needed by one of the software components and associating the one or more amounts with the one of the software components to enable execution of the mission system model; based on the user input, associating at least some of the architectural components with runtime availability analysis components for receiving and responding to availability attribute messages in the runtime environment; based on the user input, associating availability characteristics with one of the at least some of the architectural components; dynamically modeling system availability, the modeling performed by sending an availability attribute message input by the user to an availability analysis component associated with one of the architectural components and monitoring behavior of at least one of the hardware or the software component of the at least some of the architectural components in response to the message; dynamically indicating availability of the mission system model to the user based on the behavior; wherein the availability characteristics for a software component comprise at least one of failure rate, coldstart time, restart time, redundancy, cascading failures, minimum acceptable level, and switchover time; and wherein the availability attribute message indicates one of the following: coldstart, restart, switchover, operational, and fail.