Dependability modeling and evaluation of software fault-tolerant systems

Dependability modeling and evaluation (encompassing reliability and safety issues) of the two major fault tolerance software approaches-recovery blocks (RBs) and N version programming (NVP)-are presented. The study is based on the detailed analysis of software fault-tolerance architectures able to tolerate a single fault (RB: two alternates and an acceptance test; NVP: three versions and a decider). For each approach a detailed model based on the software production process is established and then simplified by assuming that only a single fault type may manifest during execution of the fault-tolerant software and that no error compensation may take place within the software. The analytical results obtained make it possible to identify the improvement, compared to a non-fault-tolerant software, that could result from the use of RB (the acceptance test has to be more reliable from the alternates) and NVP (related faults among the versions and the decider have to be minimized) and to determine the most critical types of related faults. Nested RBs are studied, showing that the proposed analysis approach can be applied to such realistic software structures and that when an alternate is itself an RB, the results are analogous to the case of the addition of a third alternate. The reliability analysis shows that only a small improvement can be expected.<
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