SYSTEM DEPENDABILITY EVALUATION VIA A FAULT LIST GENERATION ALGORITHM

The size and complexity of modem dependable computing systems has sign ificantly compromised the ability to accurately measure system dependa bility attributes such as fault coverage and fault latency. fault inje ction is one approach for the evaluation of dependability metrics. Unf ortunately, fault injection techniques are difficult to apply because the size of the fault set is essentially infinite. Current techniques select faults randomly resulting in many fault injection experiments w hich do not yield any useful information. This research effort has dev eloped a new deterministic, automated dependability evaluation techniq ue using fault injection. The primary objective of this research effor t was the development and implementation of algorithms which generate a fault set which fully exercises the fault detection and fault proces sing aspects of the system. The theory supporting the developed algori thms is presented first. Next, a conceptual overview of the developed algorithms is followed by the implementation details of the algorithms . The last section of this paper presents experimental results gathere d via simulation-based fault injection of an Interlocking Control Syst em (ICS). The end result is a deterministic, automated method for accu rately evaluating complex dependable computing systems using fault inj ection.