Reliability and availability prediction of embedded systems based on environment modeling and simulation

Abstract

The embedded system developers often need to perform software testing even when the target hardware is inaccessible. Due to the inaccessibility of the hardware, the hardware-software interaction testing becomes a challenging task. Researchers have tried to overcome this issue by developing an environment model that simulates the behavior of the actual hardware. In the existing literature, environment modeling has been used for embedded software testing and rarely used for reliability and availability prediction. In this study, we make an attempt to use the environment model for the reliability and availability prediction when actual hardware is inaccessible. At first, we model the hardware environment simulator referring to the System Requirements Specification document. Then, we use the environment simulator for simulating different operational scenarios of the hardware. Based on the operational scenarios, random test cases are generated for testing the embedded software. Finally, we predict the reliability and availability of the system using the test results. Four important aspects covered in this prediction approach are: 1) developing a method for system reliability and availability prediction using environment modeling and simulation technique, 2) considering software-related hardware and hardware-related software interaction failures, 3) applying the proposed reliability and availability model to a case study, and 4) validating the method by comparing the results with an existing approach.