Dependability Assessment of GUARDS Instances

Jean Arlat (1) , Tahar Jarboui (1) , Karama Kanoun (1) , David Powell (1)

1 LAAS-TSF - Équipe Tolérance aux fautes et Sûreté de Fonctionnement informatique

The generic architectural concepts developed in the framework of the European ESPRIT project GUARDS (Generic Upgradable Architecture for Real time Distributed Systems) provide a comprehensive framework from which specific instances can be derived to meet the dependability requirements of various application domains. Three main application domains are considered (railway, nuclear propulsion and space) that correspond to the fields of the three end-user partners of the project. This paper presents the modeling method supporting the assessment of GUARDS instances. The goal is to assist the designers in making objective decisions for defining a specific instance from the generic architecture. After a short summary of the main architectural concepts of GUARDS, the paper describes the major assumptions considered for the modeling that concern: i) component types (both hardware and software), ii) fault types, where special attention is paid to potentially correlated faults, and iii) the generic fault tolerance features of GUARDS. The main architectural characteristics of the target instances (one for each application domain) are briefly described. The modeling strategy is summarized and examples of models (stochastic Petri nets) are given. Selected results are then presented and discussed; they exemplify the usefulness of the modeling and evaluation method, in

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]; Performance et fiabilité [cs.PF]; Modélisation et simulation

Jean Arlat, Tahar Jarboui, Karama Kanoun, David Powell. Dependability Assessment of GUARDS Instances. 4th IEEE International Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium (IPDS'2000), Mar 2000, Chicago, United States. ⟨hal-01976690⟩