Reliability Assessment of Combined Hardware–Software Non-repairable Time-Critical Systems

Abstract

Abstract Although there exist various reliability assessment models, many of these models did not consider the temporal incorrectness, incompatibilities and dependencies between hardware and software. Also, many models did not consider the hardware changes, software changes and hardware changes leading to software changes resulting in system failure. Thus, an approach that considers various aspects like pure software failures, pure hardware failures, software change, hardware change, hardware change leading to software change and incompatibility issues between hardware and software components (in the presence of temporal incorrectness) leading to the failure of non-repairable time-critical heterogeneous software systems has been developed. This approach considers the operation of the hardware–software system, both in normal (non-degraded) and degraded modes. The proposed approach was applied to a time-critical stepper motor system, results were obtained and a case study was performed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been analyzed by comparing the results obtained from the proposed approach with the results obtained from the other existing approaches.