Failure Type-Aware Reliability Assessment with Component Failure Dependency

Most of the existing reliability assessment techniques assume that components fail independently and consider different types of failures equally. By disregarding component failure dependency, these techniques assume inappropriately that a component failure does not affect any other component and it directly leads to a system failure. Also, by considering different failure types equally, reliability assessment disregards various criticality levels or severities of different failures. In practice, component failures affect other system components and vary with respect to their criticality levels. Recently, some propagation-based techniques incorporate component failure dependency in the reliability measure through failure propagation analysis by focusing only on value failures. Therefore, other failures (e.g., silent and performance) are not considered in the current failure propagation analysis. In this paper, we present an approach for reliability assessment of fault tolerant component-based software systems considering component failure dependency and enabling failure type-awareness. We incorporate component failure dependency in the reliability quantification by analyzing failure propagation among system components. We enable failure type-awareness by analyzing the propagation of different failure types in fault tolerant components and the architectural service routes among them. Finally, we aggregate the impacts of these failure types on system reliability.