The goals of this project were the development of performance measures suitable for use in real-time embedded systems. Developed a network measure to guide the designer in choosing an appropriate network topology. The measure combines graphic-theoretic concepts in evaluating the underlying reliability of the network and other means to evaluate the ability of the network to support interprocessor traffic. A second measure, called the computer measure, is meant to evaluated the computer system in terms that are of importance for real-time applications. A simulator testbed called TRIDENT was built to evaluate the network and surge measures. Much of the technology developed under this project is being transferred to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

In architecting dependable systems, what is required to improve the overall system robustness is fault tolerance. Many methods have been proposed to this end, the solutions are usually considered late during the design and implementation phases of the software life-cycle (e.g., Java and Windows NT exception handling), thus reducing the effectiveness error and fault handling. Since the system design typically models only normal behaviour of the system while ignoring exceptional ones, the implementation of the system is unable to handle abnormal events. Consequently, the system may fail in unexpected ways due to faults.It has been argued that fault tolerance management during the entire life-cycle improves the overall system robustness and that different classes of threats need to be identified for and dealt with at each distinct phase of software development, depending on the abstraction level of the software system being modelled.This book builds on this trend and investigates how fault tolerance mechanisms can be applied when engineering a software system. In particular, it identifies the new problems arising in this area, introduces the new models to be applied at different abstraction levels, defines methodologies for model-driven engineering of such systems and outlines the new technologies and validation and verification environments supporting this.

Software Reliability Assessment with OR Applications is a comprehensive guide to software reliability measurement, prediction, and control. It provides a thorough understanding of the field and gives solutions to the decision-making problems that concern software developers, engineers, practitioners, scientists, and researchers. Using operations research techniques, readers will learn how to solve problems under constraints such as cost, budget and schedules to achieve the highest possible quality level. Software Reliability Assessment with OR Applications is a comprehensive text on software engineering and applied statistics, state-of-the art software reliability modeling, techniques and methods for reliability assessment, and related optimization problems. It addresses various topics, including: unification methodologies in software reliability assessment; application of neural networks to software reliability assessment; software reliability growth modeling using stochastic differential equations; software release time and resource allocation problems; and optimum component selection and reliability analysis for fault tolerant systems. Software Reliability Assessment with OR Applications is designed to cater to the needs of software engineering practitioners, developers, security or risk managers, and statisticians. It can also be used as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or postgraduate courses in software reliability, industrial engineering, and operations research and management.

This Open Access book introduces readers to many new techniques for enhancing and optimizing reliability in embedded systems, which have emerged particularly within the last five years. This book introduces the most prominent reliability concerns from today’s points of view and roughly recapitulates the progress in the community so far. Unlike other books that focus on a single abstraction level such circuit level or system level alone, the focus of this book is to deal with the different reliability challenges across different levels starting from the physical level all the way to the system level (cross-layer approaches). The book aims at demonstrating how new hardware/software co-design solution can be proposed to ef-fectively mitigate reliability degradation such as transistor aging, processor variation, temperature effects, soft errors, etc. Provides readers with latest insights into novel, cross-layer methods and models with respect to dependability of embedded systems; Describes cross-layer approaches that can leverage reliability through techniques that are pro-actively designed with respect to techniques at other layers; Explains run-time adaptation and concepts/means of self-organization, in order to achieve error resiliency in complex, future many core systems.

Provides an up-to-date review of the latest developments in system reliability maintenance, fault detection and fault-tolerant design techniques. Topics covered include reliability analysis and optimization, maintenance control policies, fault detection techniques, fault-tolerant systems, reliable controllers and robustness, knowledge based approaches and decision support systems. There are further applications papers on process control, robotics, manufacturing systems, communications and power systems. Contains 36 papers.