Model-Based Evaluation of Energy Saving Systems

Nowadays, there is a great attention towards cautious usage of energy sources to be employed in disparate application domains, including critical infrastructures, to save both in financial terms and in environmental impact. This chapter focuses on stochastic model-based as a support to the analysis of energy saving systems, in combination with other non functional properties, such as reliability, safety and availability. We discuss general guidelines to build a model-based framework to analyse critical cyber-physical systems, where effective energy consumption is required, while assuring imposed levels of resilience. Also, an overview of the most commonly employed methodologies and tools for model-based analysis is provided, and extensive literature is indicated as pointers to relevant research activities performed on this attractive topic over the last decades. Finally, in order to corroborate the proposed framework, a case study in the railway domain is proposed. By adopting the Stochastic Activity Networks formalism, the framework is instantiated to analyse effective trade-offs between energy consumption and satisfaction of other dependability related requirements.