Run-time monitoring for dependable systems: an approach and a case study

This paper describes a run-time monitoring system designed for same functionality systems installed in different places that use equivalent hardware configurations, but with slightly different implementations. These systems exhibit common characteristics. They are large software systems, they depend on hardware to execute their functions, and they are usually adjusted to meet new user needs. In this scenario it is unreasonable to assume that software testing will uncover all latent errors. Besides gathering information about a target program as it executes the run-time monitoring system proposed provides information about the target operating system and the target hardware in order to improve availability by reducing time to diagnose failures and provide a system with the reactive capability of reconfiguring and reinitializing after the occurrence of a failure. A case study for an automatic teller machine system is discussed as an application of the run-time monitoring system and the results from this application are presented.