RELSPEC: a framework for reliability aware design of component based embedded systems

Abstract

With the increase in the complexity of safety-critical embedded applications, the reliability analysis of such systems have also become increasingly difficult. For such complex system specifications, if the reliability provisions are declared upfront in the design flow then the overall system level reliability can be easily inferred given that the system components satisfy their individual reliability requirements. Moreover, such an early-stage specification and analysis paves newer and scalable ways for synthesis of reliable systems. This paper develops a reliability specification and analysis framework, RELSPEC, which enables system level reliability analysis at an early-stage of design by leveraging automatically constructed intermediate probabilistic models of the system. In addition to this, we provide a mechanized method of system synthesis with the objective of satisfying a target reliability value for the overall system. To this end, we explore the application of existing optimization methods and also provide domain specific techniques which outperform such existing methods. Experiments over a few automotive case-studies show the efficacy of this methodology.