Bayesian sequential testing for exponential life system with reliability growth

A Bayesian sequential testing method is proposed to evaluate system reliability index with reliability growth during development.The method develops a reliability growth model of repairable systems for failure censored test,and figures out the approach to determine the prior distribution of the system failure rate by applying the reliability growth model to incorporate the multistage test data collected from system development.Furthermore,the procedure for the Bayesian sequential testing is derived for the failure rate of the exponential life system,which enables the decision to terminate or continue development test.Finally,a numerical example is given to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed model and procedure.

Discrete Software Reliability Growth Modeling for Errors of Different Severity Incorporating Change-point Concept

Several software reliability growth models （SRGM） have been developed to monitor the reliability growth during the testing phase of software development. In most of the existing research available in the literatures, it is considered that a similar testing effort is required on each debugging effort. However, in practice, different types of faults may require different amounts of testing efforts for their detection and removal. Consequently, faults are classified into three categories on the basis of severity： simple, hard and complex. This categorization may be extended to r type of faults on the basis of severity. Although some existing research in the literatures has incorporated this concept that fault removal rate （FRR） is different for different types of faults, they assume that the FRR remains constant during the overall testing period. On the contrary, it has been observed that as testing progresses, FRR changes due to changing testing strategy, skill, environment and personnel resources. In this paper, a general discrete SRGM is proposed for errors of different severity in software systems using the change-point concept. Then, the models are formulated for two particular environments. The models were validated on two real-life data sets. The results show better fit and wider applicability of the proposed models as to different types of failure datasets.

Reliability Growth Modeling and Optimal Release Policy Under Fuzzy Environment of an N-version Programming System Incorporating the Effect of Fault Removal Efficiency

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.

A New Analysis Concept in Applying Software Reliability Growth Models and Tool Implementation: The SafeMan

In recent years, many software development organizations have been assessing and analyzing their software product’s reliability/quality and judging whether the software product is releasable by using Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) at the final stage of software development. The usage of SRGMs originates in the advantage that various reliability analysis results based on the SRGMs can be acquired easily. However, it is very difficult for general software project managers to grasp the achievement level of reliability/quality based on its analysis results because some sort of professional knowledge is required in order to understand the information on the attainment progress of software product’s reliability/quality. Moreover, it is also difficult for software project managers and inspectors who do not deeply comprehend the details of their project to evaluate the degree of software reliability and quality, if they assess it without grasping the live development situation and only see the documents submitted from their staff. In this paper, we propose a new analysis concept for assessing the software product’s reliability/quality, and illustrate the output results obtained by a tool, the SafeMan.

Using Artificial Neural-Networks in Stochastic Differential Equations Based Software Reliability Growth Modeling

Due to high cost of fixing failures, safety concerns, and legal liabilities, organizations need to produce software that is highly reliable. Software reliability growth models have been developed by software developers in tracking and measuring the growth of reliability. Most of the Software Reliability Growth Models, which have been proposed, treat the event of software fault detection in the testing and operational phase as a counting process. Moreover, if the size of software system is large, the number of software faults detected during the testing phase becomes large, and the change of the number of faults which are detected and removed through debugging activities becomes sufficiently small compared with the initial fault content at the beginning of the testing phase. Therefore in such a situation, we can model the software fault detection process as a stochastic process with a continuous state space. Recently, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied in software reliability growth prediction. In this paper, we propose an ANN based software reliability growth model based on Ito type of stochastic differential equation. The model has been validated, evaluated and compared with other existing NHPP model by applying it on actual failure/fault removal data sets cited from real software development projects. The proposed model integrated with the concept of stochastic differential equation performs comparatively better than the existing NHPP based model.

Bayesian synthetic evaluation of multistage reliability growth with instant and delayed fix modes

In the multistage reliability growth tests with instant and delayed fix modes, the failure data can be assumed to follow Weibull processes with different parameters at different stages. For the Weibull process within a stage, by the proper selection of prior distribution form and the parameters, a concise posterior distribution form is obtained, thus simplifying the Bayesian analysis. In the multistage tests, the improvement factor is used to convert the posterior of one stage to the prior of the subsequent stage. The conversion criterion is carefully analyzed to determine the distribution parameters of the subsequent stage＇s variable reasonably. Based on the mentioned results, a new synthetic Bayesian evaluation program and algorithm framework is put forward to evaluate the multistage reliability growth tests with instant and delayed fix modes. The example shows the effectiveness and flexibility of this method.

RESEARCH ON RELIABILITY GROWTH FOR SYNCHRONOUSLY DEVELOPED MULTI-SYSTEMS

An advanced reliability growth model, i. e. exponential model, was presented to estimate the model parameters for multi-systems, which was synchronously tested, synchronously censored, and synchronously improved. In the presented method, the data during the reliability growth process were taken into consideration sufficiently, including the failure numbers, safety numbers and failure time at each censored time. If the multi-systems were synchronously improved for many times, and the reliability growth of each system fitted AMSAA （Army Material Systems Analysis Activity） model, the failure time of each system could be considered rationally as an exponential distribution between two adjoining censored times. The nonparametric method was employed to obtain the reliability at each censored time of the synchronous multisystems. The point estimations of the model parameters, a and b, were given by the least square method. The confidence interval for the parameter b was given as well. An engineering illustration was used to compare the result of the presented method with those of the available models. The result shows that the presented exponential growth model fits AMSAA-BISE （ Army Material Systems Analysis Activity-Beijing Institute of Structure and Environment） model rather well, and two models are suitable to estimate the reliability growth for the synchronously developed multi-systems.

COMMENTS ON AMSAA-BISE RELIABILITY GROWTH MODEL (Ⅰ)

From 1986 to 1991,based on AMSAA model, ZHOU Yuan_quan and WENG Zhao_xi presented AMSAA_BISE model to estimate reliability growth for multiple systems development, for the case that more than one system of the same type is put into reliability growth test, once a Type B failure mode is seen during test, corrective action will be taken to all systems. It is shown that there is something wrong with AMSAA_BISE model. According to AMSAA_BISE model, the maximum likelihood estimation of MTBF for multiple systems reliability growth test is much larger than that according to AMSAA model for a single system; The more systems is put into test, the larger the estimation of MTBF. An example is given, and an approximate method is presented.

Reliability Growth Test Planning and Verification of Commercial Vehicles

Reliability and durability are two important technical indicators in automobile research and development.A research-and-design and testing organization can increase inherent quality attributes by adopting a systematic approach based on statistical tools and clearly defined processes.The process affects the design phase,validation through testing,and quality assurance in production.On the basis of reliability growth theory and the Duane model,this study established an estimation method for the definition of the target mileage and specific test cycles in reliability growth testing.A construction method for defin-ing test conditions was proposed that adopts the theory of the design of experiments.The simulation was conducted under a variety of typical test conditions including differing operation times,loads,and logistics modes to predict customer use and detect failures.Failure cases were then analyzed in detail.At the same time,a reliability growth prediction model was established on the basis of the initial test data and used for test process tracking and risk control.

Software Reliability Growth Model Considering First-Step and Second-Step Fault Dependency

As one of the most important indexes to evaluate the quality of software, software reliability experiences an increasing development in recent years. We investigate a software reliability growth model(SRGM). The application of this model is to predict the occurrence of the software faults based on the non-homogeneous Poisson process(NHPP). Unlike the independent assumptions in other models, we consider fault dependency. The testing faults are divided into three classes in this model: leading faults, first-step dependent faults and second-step dependent faults. The leading faults occurring independently follow an NHPP, while the first-step dependent faults only become detectable after the related leading faults are detected. The second-step dependent faults can only be detected after the related first-step dependent faults are detected. Then, the combined model is built on the basis of the three sub-processes. Finally, an illustration based on real dataset is presented to verify the proposed model.

Incorporating S-shaped testing-effort functions into NHPP software reliability model with imperfect debugging

Testing-effort（TE） and imperfect debugging（ID） in the reliability modeling process may further improve the fitting and prediction results of software reliability growth models（SRGMs）. For describing the S-shaped varying trend of TE increasing rate more accurately, first, two S-shaped testing-effort functions（TEFs）, i.e.,delayed S-shaped TEF（DS-TEF） and inflected S-shaped TEF（IS-TEF）, are proposed. Then these two TEFs are incorporated into various types（exponential-type, delayed S-shaped and inflected S-shaped） of non-homogeneous Poisson process（NHPP）SRGMs with two forms of ID respectively for obtaining a series of new NHPP SRGMs which consider S-shaped TEFs as well as ID. Finally these new SRGMs and several comparison NHPP SRGMs are applied into four real failure data-sets respectively for investigating the fitting and prediction power of these new SRGMs.The experimental results show that：（i） the proposed IS-TEF is more suitable and flexible for describing the consumption of TE than the previous TEFs;（ii） incorporating TEFs into the inflected S-shaped NHPP SRGM may be more effective and appropriate compared with the exponential-type and the delayed S-shaped NHPP SRGMs;（iii） the inflected S-shaped NHPP SRGM considering both IS-TEF and ID yields the most accurate fitting and prediction results than the other comparison NHPP SRGMs.

NHPP-based software reliability model considering testing effort and multivariate fault detection rate

In recent decades,many software reliability growth models（SRGMs） have been proposed for the engineers and testers in measuring the software reliability precisely.Most of them is established based on the non-homogeneous Poisson process（NHPP）,and it is proved that the prediction accuracy of such models could be improved by adding the describing of characterization of testing effort.However,some research work indicates that the fault detection rate（FDR） is another key factor affects final software quality.Most early NHPPbased models deal with the FDR as constant or piecewise function,which does not fit the different testing stages well.Thus,this paper first incorporates a multivariate function of FDR,which is bathtub-shaped,into the NHPP-based SRGMs considering testing effort in order to further improve performance.A new model framework is proposed,and a stepwise method is used to apply the framework with real data sets to find the optimal model.Experimental studies show that the obtained new model can provide better performance of fitting and prediction compared with other traditional SRGMs.

Lognormal Process Software Reliability Modeling with Testing-Effort

We propose a software reliability growth model with testing-effort based on a continuous-state space stochastic process, such as a lognormal process, and conduct its goodness-of-fit evaluation. We also discuss a parameter estimation method of our model. Then, we derive several software reliability assessment measures by the probability distribution of its solution process, and compare our model with existing continuous-state space software reliability growth models in terms of the mean square error and the Akaike’s information criterion by using actual fault count data.

Web software reliability modeling with random impulsive shocks

As the web-server based business is rapidly developed and popularized, how to evaluate and improve the reliability of web-servers has been extremely important. Although a large num- ber of software reliability growth models （SRGMs）, including those combined with multiple change-points （CPs）, have been available, these conventional SRGMs cannot be directly applied to web soft- ware reliability analysis because of the complex web operational profile. To characterize the web operational profile precisely, it should be realized that the workload of a web server is normally non-homogeneous and often observed with the pattern of random impulsive shocks. A web software reliability model with random im- pulsive shocks and its statistical analysis method are developed. In the proposed model, the web server workload is characterized by a geometric Brownian motion process. Based on a real data set from IIS server logs of ICRMS website （www.icrms.cn）, the proposed model is demonstrated to be powerful for estimating impulsive shocks and web software reliability.

A Bivariate Software Reliability Model with Change-Point and Its Applications

Testing-time when a change of a stochastic characteristic of the software failure-occurrence time or software failure-occurrence time-interval is observed is called change-point. It is said that effect of the change-point on the software reliability growth process influences on accuracy for software reliability assessment based on a software reliability growth model (SRGM). We propose an SRGM with the effect of the change-point based on a bivariate SRGM, in which the software reliability growth process is assumed to depend on the testing-time and testing-effort factors simultaneously, for accurate software reliability assessment. And we discuss an optimal software release problem for deriving optimal testing-effort expenditures based on our model. Further, we show numerical examples of software reliability assessment based on our bivariate SRGM and estimation of optimal testing-effort expenditures by using actual data.

The AMSAA-BISE Model with Gap Intervals

In this paper, the AMSAA-BISE model with missing data is discussed. The ML estimates of model parameters and current MTBF are given, and the chi-squared test and a plot for cumulative number of failures versus cumulative testing time are used to test the goodness of fit for the model. This paper concludes with a numerical example to verify the model.

Component-based software reliability process simulation considering imperfect debugging

In view of the flaws of component-based software(CBS) reliability modeling and analysis,the low recognition degree of debugging process,too many assumptions and difficulties in obtaining the solution,a CBS reliability simulation process is presented incorporating the imperfect debugging and the limitation of debugging resources.Considering the effect of imperfect debugging on fault detection and correction process,a CBS integration testing model is sketched by multi-queue multichannel and finite server queuing model(MMFSQM).Compared with the analytical method based on parameters and other nonparametric approaches,the simulation approach can relax more of the usual reliability modeling assumptions and effectively expound integration testing process of CBS.Then,CBS reliability process simulation procedure is developed accordingly.The proposed simulation approach is validated to be sound and effective by simulation experiment studies and analysis.

基于AMSAA模型的复杂舰炮武器系统可靠性增长方法

可靠性增长主要用于产品以完成初样机研制,在产品未定型之前,利用有限的时间完成故障纠正,对产品设计和制造工艺进行更改。针对复杂舰炮武器系统具有机、电、液高度耦合的工作方式,以及其系统失效时间分布复杂、难以用单一分布描述的特点,在完成系统故障模式、影响分析(FMEA)和故障树分析(FTA)的基础上,定义系统的两类故障(A类故障及B类故障),提出了基于AMSAA模型的复杂舰炮武器系统可靠性增长方法,通过趋势检验、参数估计、拟合度检验的过程,将有限的试验信息纳入AMSAA的可靠性增长和预测模型,并在系统完成定型时给出其可靠性增长水平,用于判断其可靠性指标是否满足用户提出的研制要求。

Early Stage Software Reliability Estimation with Stochastic Reward Nets

This paper presents software reliability modeling issues at the early stage of a software development for fault tolerant software management system. Based on Stochastic Reward Nets, an effective model of hierarchical view for a fault tolerant software management system is put forward, and an approach that consists of system transient performance analysis is adopted. A quantitative approach for software reliability analysis is given. The results show its usefulness for the design and evaluation of the early-stage software reliability modeling when failure data is not available.

高可靠舰船装备软件可靠性的两阶段验证方案

针对高可靠舰船装备软件可靠性验证存在的测试周期长、测试剖面难以准确反映真实使用环境等问题,提出了一种两阶段可靠性验证方案。首先,在研发阶段对软件提出可靠性要求,并基于该阶段产生的可靠性增长测试信息,利用软件可靠性增长模型评估软件可靠性水平,验证其是否达到规定的可靠性要求;然后,基于最大后验风险制定贝叶斯验证方案,并在软件试用阶段利用用户现场使用信息验证软件可靠性。实例分析结果表明:所提的两阶段验证方案能缩短软件可靠性验证时长、方便工程实施;利用用户现场使用信息给出验证结论,使结论具备较高的可信性。