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Trade-offs in developing fault tolerant software

Trade-offs in developing fault tolerant software

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  • Author(s): N.H. Vaidya 1 ; A.D. Singh 2 ; C.M. Krishna 3
    • View affiliations
    • Affiliations: 1: Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA
      2: Department of Electrical Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, USA
      3: Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
  • Source: Volume 140, Issue 6, November 1993, p. 320 – 326
    DOI:  10.1049/ip-e.1993.0045 , Print ISSN 0143-7062, Online ISSN 2053-7948
© The Institution of Electrical Engineers
Published

Design diversity has emerged as a powerful mechanism for incorporating software fault tolerance in ultra-reliable systems. In this paper we study the trade-offs available during the development process of fault-tolerant software employing the recovery block approach [2]. When the total available testing time is bounded, our analysis determines how appropriately to allocate testing time to the various redundant modules that make up the fault tolerant system so as to maximise its reliability. This requires a study of the interactions between the various modules in the software system. For example error coverage and the false alarm probability of acceptance test in the recovery block scheme may be interrelated and it may not be possible to simultaneously improve both. Hence there exists a trade-off between acceptance test coverage and false alarm probability. The impact of such trade-offs on system reliability is also studied.

Inspec keywords: program testing; redundancy; fault tolerant computing; error handling; software reliability

Other keywords: system reliability; testing time; software fault tolerance; fly-by-wire aircraft; error coverage; false alarm probability; acceptance test; recovery block approach; life-critical processes; redundant modules; recovery blocks; software testing; fault tolerant software; ultra-reliable systems

Subjects: Performance evaluation and testing; Software engineering techniques

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