Causality analysis and fault ascription in component-based systems

Abstract

This article introduces a general framework for fault ascription, which consists in identifying, within a multi-component system, the components whose faulty behavior has caused the failure of said system. Our framework uses configuration structures as a general semantical model to handle truly concurrent executions, partial and distributed observations in a uniform way. As a first contribution, and in contrast with most of the current literature on counterfactual analysis which relies heavily on a set of toy examples, we first define a set of expected formal properties for counterfactual builders, i.e. operators that build counterfactual executions. We then show that causality analyses that satisfy our requirements meet a set of elementary soundness and completeness properties. Finally we present a concrete causality analysis meeting all our requirements, and we show that it behaves well under refinement. We present several examples illustrating various phenomena such as causal over-determination or observational determinism, and we discuss the relationship of our approach with Halpern and Pearl's actual causality analysis.