A Framework for Designing Reliable Software-Intensive Systems

Abstract

This project involved a joint research performed primarily at Oregon State University and "The Ohio State University. Software-driven hardware configurations account for the majority of modern safety-critical complex systems. The often costly failures of such systems can be attributed to software specific, hardware specific, or software/hardware interaction failures. The understanding of how failures propagate in such complex systems might provide critical information to designers, because, while a software component may not fail in terms of loss of function, a software operational state can cause an associated hardware failure. The least expensive phase of the product life cycle to address failures is during the design stage. This research presents a means to evaluate how a combined software/hardware system behaves and how such failures propagate to result in potential failures downstream, during the conceptual design stage. In particular, this research proposes the use of high-level system modeling and model-based reasoning approaches to model failure propagation in combined software-hardware systems, based on the Function-Failure Identification and Propagation (FFIP) analysis framework to help formalize the design of safety-critical systems.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2011
Accession Number
ADA566687

Entities

People

  • Carol Smidts
  • Irem Y. Tumer

Organizations

  • Ohio State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boiling Water Reactors
  • Case Studies
  • Classification
  • Complex Systems
  • Cycles
  • Engineering
  • Failure Analysis
  • Identification
  • Life Cycles
  • Manufacturing Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Reasoning
  • Safety
  • Safety Engineering
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Software Testing

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Software Engineering.
  • Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Structures.