Abstract
A key concern in safety engineering is understanding the overall emergent failure behaviour of a system, i.e., behaviour exhibited by the system that is outside its specification of acceptable behaviour. A system can exhibit failure behaviour in many ways, including that from failures of individual or a small number of components. It is important for safety engineers to understand how system failure behaviour relates to failures exhibited by individual components. In this paper, we propose a safety analysis technique, failure propagation and transformation analysis (FPTA), which automatically and quantitatively analyses failures based on a model of failure logic. The technique integrates previous work on automated failure analysis with probabilistic model checking supported by the PRISM tool. We demonstrate the technique and tool on a small, yet realistic safety-related application.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
IEC 60812. Functional safety of electrical/electronical/programmable electronic safety/related systems, analysis techniques for system reliability - procedure for failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). Technical report, International Electrotechnical Commission IEC (1991)
Fenelon, P., McDermid, J.A.: New directions in software safety: Causal modelling as an aid to integration. Technical report, High Integrity Systems Engineering Group, Dept of Computer Science, University of York (1992)
Fenelon, P., McDermid, J.A.: An integrated toolset for software safety analysis. The Journal of Systems and Software 21(3), 279–290 (1993)
Hiller, M., Jhumka, A., Suri, N.: An approach for analysing the propagation of data errors in software. In: Proceedings of 2001 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks DSN 2001, Göteborg, Sweden, July 2001, pp. 161–172. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2001)
Hiller, M., Jhumka, A., Suri, N.: Propane: an environment for examining the propagation of errors in software. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2002, Roma, Italy, pp. 81–85. ACM, New York (2002)
Kaiser, B., Liggesmeyer, P., Mäckel, O.: A new component concept for fault trees. In: Proceedings of the 8th Australian Workshop on Safety Critical Systems and Software, SCS 2003 (2003)
Kwiatkowska, M.Z., Norman, G., Parker, D.: PRISM: Probabilistic symbolic model checker. In: Field, T., Harrison, P.G., Bradley, J., Harder, U. (eds.) TOOLS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2324, pp. 200–204. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Li, B., Li, M., Ghose, S., Smidts, C.: Integrating software into PRA. In: Proceedings of 14th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2003, Denver, CO, USA, November 2003, pp. 457–467 (2003)
Michael, C.C., Jones, R.C.: On the uniformity of error propagation in software. In: Proceedings of 12th Annual Conference on Computer Assurance (COMPASS 1997), pp. 68–76 (1997)
Nassar, D.E.M., Abdelmoez, W., Shereshevsky, M., Ammar, H.H., Mili, A., Yu, B., Bogazzi, S.: Error propagation analysis of software architecture specifications. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering, ICCCE 2006, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (May 2006)
Paige, R.F., Rose, L.M., Ge, X., Kolovos, D.S., Brooke, P.J.: Automated safety analysis for domain-specific languages. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Non-Functional System Properties in Domain Specific Modeling Languages, co-located with 11th International Conference of Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MoDELS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5421, Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Papadopoulos, Y., McDermid, J.A., Sasse, R., Heiner, G.: Analysis and synthesis of the behaviour of complex programmable electronic systems in conditions of failure. Reliability Engineering and System Safety 71, 229–247 (2001)
Voas, J.M.: Pie: A dynamic failure-based technique. IEEE Transaction of Software Engineering 18(8), 717–727 (1992)
Voas, J.M.: Error propagation analysis for COTS systems. IEEE Computing and Control Engineering Journal 8(6), 269–272 (1997)
Wallace, M.: Modular architectural representation and analysis of fault propagation and transformation. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 141(3), 53–71 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ge, X., Paige, R.F., McDermid, J.A. (2009). Probabilistic Failure Propagation and Transformation Analysis. In: Buth, B., Rabe, G., Seyfarth, T. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5775. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04468-7_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04468-7_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04467-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04468-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)