A survey on simulation-based fault injection tools for complex systems

Dependability is a key decision factor in today's global business environment. A powerful method that permits to evaluate the dependability of a system is the fault injection. The principle of this approach is to insert faults into the system and to monitor its responses in order to observe its behavior in the presence of faults. Several fault injection techniques and tools have been developed and experimentally tested. They could be mainly grouped into three categories: hardware fault injection, simulation-based fault injection, and emulation-based fault injection. This paper presents a survey on the simulation-based fault injection techniques, with a focus on complex micro-processor based systems.