Architecture-Based Reliability Prediction with the Palladio Component Model
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | IEEE transactions on software engineering |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | Article URL |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2011.94 |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | Software architectures; quality analysis and evaluation; reliability; design tools and techniques |
| Description | With the increasing importance of reliability in business and industrial software systems, new techniques of architecture-based reliability engineering are becoming an integral part of the development process. These techniques can assist system architects in evaluating the reliability impact of their design decisions. Architecture-based reliability engineering is only effective if the involved reliability models reflect the interaction and usage of software components and their deployment to potentially unreliable hardware. However, existing approaches either neglect individual impact factors on reliability or hard-code them into formal models, which limits their applicability in component-based development processes. This paper introduces a reliability modelling and prediction technique that considers the relevant architectural factors of software systems and explicitly models the component usage profile and execution environment. The technique offers a UML-like modelling notation, whose models are automatically transformed into a formal analytical model. Our work builds upon the Palladio Component Model, employing novel techniques of information propagation and reliability assessment. We validate our technique with sensitivity analyses and simulation in two case studies. The case studies demonstrate effective support of usage profile analysis and architectural configuration ranking, together with the employment of reliability-improving architecture tactics. |
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