Framework for Designing Reliable Software-Intensive Systems.

摘要

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.