A Modest Markov Automata Tutorial (Artifact)

Distributed computing systems provide many important services. To explain and understand why and how well they work, it is common practice to build, maintain, and analyse models of the systems' behaviours. Markov models are frequently used to study operational phenomena of such systems. They are often represented with discrete state spaces, and come in various flavours, overarched by Markov automata. In our tutorial paper titled "A Modest Markov Automata Tutorial", we give an introduction to the formalism of Markov automata, to practical modelling of Markov automata in the Modest language, and to their analysis with the Modest Toolset. As case studies, we optimise an attack on Bitcoin, and evaluate the performance of a small but complex resource-sharing computing system. This artifact contains (1) all Modest models and (2) all command lines to run the Modest Toolset presented in the paper, and (3) a compatible version of the Modest Toolset.

Dependability evaluation, Markov models, Modest Toolset, Modest language, Performance evaluation, Computation theory and mathematics, Distributed computing