Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, Volume 4615/2007, 409-433, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-74035-3_18

Extending Failure Modes and Effects Analysis Approach for Reliability Analysis at the Software Architecture Design Level

Hasan Sozer, Bedir Tekinerdogan and Mehmet Aksit

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Abstract

Several reliability engineering approaches have been proposed to identify and recover from failures. A well-known and mature approach is the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) method that is usually utilized together with Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) to analyze and diagnose the causes of failures. Unfortunately, both approaches seem to have primarily focused on failures of hardware components and less on software components. Moreover, for utilizing FMEA and FTA very often an existing implementation of the system is required to perform the reliability analysis. We propose extensions to FMEA and FTA to utilize them for the reliability analysis of software at the architecture design level. We present the software architecture reliability analysis approach (SARAH) that incorporates the extended FMEA and FTA. The approach is illustrated using an industrial case for analyzing reliability of the software architecture of a Digital TV.

Keywords  reliability analysis - FMEA - FTA - software architecture evaluation

This work has been carried out as part of the TRADER project under the responsibility of the Embedded Systems Institute. This project is partially supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs under the Bsik program.

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