Failure of a safety critical system can lead to big losses. Very high software reliability is required for automating the working of systems such as aircraft controller and nuclear reactor controller software systems....Failure of a safety critical system can lead to big losses. Very high software reliability is required for automating the working of systems such as aircraft controller and nuclear reactor controller software systems. Fault-tolerant softwares are used to increase the overall reliability of software systems. Fault tolerance is achieved using the fault-tolerant schemes such as fault recovery (recovery block scheme), fault masking (N-version programming (NVP)) or a combination of both (Hybrid scheme). These softwares incorporate the ability of system survival even on a failure. Many researchers in the field of software engineering have done excellent work to study the reliability of fault-tolerant systems. Most of them consider the stable system reliability. Few attempts have been made in reliability modeling to study the reliability growth for an NVP system. Recently, a model was proposed to analyze the reliability growth of an NVP system incorporating the effect of fault removal efficiency. In this model, a proportion of the number of failures is assumed to be a measure of fault generation while an appropriate measure of fault generation should be the proportion of faults removed. In this paper, we first propose a testing efficiency model incorporating the effect of imperfect fault debugging and error generation. Using this model, a software reliability growth model (SRGM) is developed to model the reliability growth of an NVP system. The proposed model is useful for practical applications and can provide the measures of debugging effectiveness and additional workload or skilled professional required. It is very important for a developer to determine the optimal release time of the software to improve its performance in terms of competition and cost. In this paper, we also formulate the optimal software release time problem for a 3VP system under fuzzy environment and discuss a the fuzzy optimization technique for solving the problem with a numerical illustration.展开更多
For efficiently estimating the Profust failure probability based on probability input variables and fuzzy-state assumption, a General Performance Function(GPF) expression is established under the strict mathematical d...For efficiently estimating the Profust failure probability based on probability input variables and fuzzy-state assumption, a General Performance Function(GPF) expression is established under the strict mathematical derivation for the Profust reliability model. By constructing the GPF,the calculation of the Profust failure probability can be transformed into the calculation of the traditional failure probability. Then various existing methods for the traditional failure probability can be used to estimate the Profust failure probability. Due to the high efficiency of the Adaptive Kriging(AK) model and the universality of the Monte Carlo Simulation(MCS), AK inserted MCS(abbreviated as AK-MCS) has been proven to be an efficient method for estimating the failure probability. Therefore, the AK-MCS combined with the GPF(abbreviated as AK-MCS + GPF)is proposed for estimating Profust failure probability. The proposed method greatly reduces the computational cost while ensuring the accuracy. Finally, four examples are given to validate the proposed AK-MCS + GPF. The results of the examples show the rationality and the efficiency of the proposed AK-MCS + GPF.展开更多
文摘Failure of a safety critical system can lead to big losses. Very high software reliability is required for automating the working of systems such as aircraft controller and nuclear reactor controller software systems. Fault-tolerant softwares are used to increase the overall reliability of software systems. Fault tolerance is achieved using the fault-tolerant schemes such as fault recovery (recovery block scheme), fault masking (N-version programming (NVP)) or a combination of both (Hybrid scheme). These softwares incorporate the ability of system survival even on a failure. Many researchers in the field of software engineering have done excellent work to study the reliability of fault-tolerant systems. Most of them consider the stable system reliability. Few attempts have been made in reliability modeling to study the reliability growth for an NVP system. Recently, a model was proposed to analyze the reliability growth of an NVP system incorporating the effect of fault removal efficiency. In this model, a proportion of the number of failures is assumed to be a measure of fault generation while an appropriate measure of fault generation should be the proportion of faults removed. In this paper, we first propose a testing efficiency model incorporating the effect of imperfect fault debugging and error generation. Using this model, a software reliability growth model (SRGM) is developed to model the reliability growth of an NVP system. The proposed model is useful for practical applications and can provide the measures of debugging effectiveness and additional workload or skilled professional required. It is very important for a developer to determine the optimal release time of the software to improve its performance in terms of competition and cost. In this paper, we also formulate the optimal software release time problem for a 3VP system under fuzzy environment and discuss a the fuzzy optimization technique for solving the problem with a numerical illustration.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. NSFC 51475370 and 51775439)
文摘For efficiently estimating the Profust failure probability based on probability input variables and fuzzy-state assumption, a General Performance Function(GPF) expression is established under the strict mathematical derivation for the Profust reliability model. By constructing the GPF,the calculation of the Profust failure probability can be transformed into the calculation of the traditional failure probability. Then various existing methods for the traditional failure probability can be used to estimate the Profust failure probability. Due to the high efficiency of the Adaptive Kriging(AK) model and the universality of the Monte Carlo Simulation(MCS), AK inserted MCS(abbreviated as AK-MCS) has been proven to be an efficient method for estimating the failure probability. Therefore, the AK-MCS combined with the GPF(abbreviated as AK-MCS + GPF)is proposed for estimating Profust failure probability. The proposed method greatly reduces the computational cost while ensuring the accuracy. Finally, four examples are given to validate the proposed AK-MCS + GPF. The results of the examples show the rationality and the efficiency of the proposed AK-MCS + GPF.