IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/reensy/v203y2020ics0951832020305615.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A conservative confidence bound for the probability of failure on demand of a software-based system based on failure-free tests of its components

Author

Listed:
  • Bishop, Peter
  • Povyakalo, Andrey

Abstract

The standard approach to deriving the confidence bound for the probability of failure on demand (pfd) of a software-based system is to perform statistical tests on the whole system as a “black-box†. In practice, performing tests on the entire system may be infeasible for logistical reasons, such as lack of availability of all component subsystems at the same time during implementation. This paper presents a general method for deriving a confidence bound for the overall system from successful independent tests on individual system components. In addition, a strategy is presented for optimizing the number of tests allocated to system components for an arbitrary system architecture that minimizes the confidence bound for the system pfd. For some system architectures, we show that an optimum allocation of component tests is as effective as tests on the complete system for demonstrating a given confidence bound. The confidence bound calculation makes use of many of the concepts used in the reliability analysis of hardware structures, but unlike a conventional hardware analysis, the method does not presume statistical independence of failures between software components, so the confidence bound calculation for the software should always be conservative.

Suggested Citation

  • Bishop, Peter & Povyakalo, Andrey, 2020. "A conservative confidence bound for the probability of failure on demand of a software-based system based on failure-free tests of its components," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 203(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:reensy:v:203:y:2020:i:c:s0951832020305615
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2020.107060
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832020305615
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ress.2020.107060?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bishop, Peter & Povyakalo, Andrey, 2017. "Deriving a frequentist conservative confidence bound for probability of failure per demand for systems with different operational and test profiles," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 158(C), pages 246-253.
    2. Bishop, Peter & Bloomfield, Robin & Littlewood, Bev & Popov, Peter & Povyakalo, Andrey & Strigini, Lorenzo, 2014. "A conservative bound for the probability of failure of a 1-out-of-2 protection system with one hardware-only and one software-based protection train," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 61-68.
    3. Richard E. Barlow & Alexander S. Wu, 1978. "Coherent Systems with Multi-State Components," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 3(4), pages 275-281, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Popov, Peter, 2021. "Conservative reliability assessment of a 2-channel software system when one of the channels is probably perfect," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 216(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jafary, Bentolhoda & Fiondella, Lance, 2016. "A universal generating function-based multi-state system performance model subject to correlated failures," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 16-27.
    2. Rashika Gupta & Manju Agarwal, 2006. "Penalty guided genetic search for redundancy optimization in multi-state series-parallel power system," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 12(3), pages 257-277, November.
    3. Sheng, Yuhong & Ke, Hua, 2020. "Reliability evaluation of uncertain k-out-of-n systems with multiple states," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).
    4. Yan-Feng Li & Hong-Zhong Huang & Jinhua Mi & Weiwen Peng & Xiaomeng Han, 2022. "Reliability analysis of multi-state systems with common cause failures based on Bayesian network and fuzzy probability," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 311(1), pages 195-209, April.
    5. Nourelfath, Mustapha & Châtelet, Eric & Nahas, Nabil, 2012. "Joint redundancy and imperfect preventive maintenance optimization for series–parallel multi-state degraded systems," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 51-60.
    6. Ramirez-Marquez, Jose E. & Rocco, Claudio M. & Gebre, Bethel A. & Coit, David W. & Tortorella, Michael, 2006. "New insights on multi-state component criticality and importance," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 91(8), pages 894-904.
    7. Chenxi Liu & Nan Chen & Jianing Yang, 2015. "New method for multi-state system reliability analysis based on linear algebraic representation," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 229(5), pages 469-482, October.
    8. Dong, Wenjie & Liu, Sifeng & Tao, Liangyan & Cao, Yingsai & Fang, Zhigeng, 2019. "Reliability variation of multi-state components with inertial effect of deteriorating output performances," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 186(C), pages 176-185.
    9. Serkan Eryılmaz, 2011. "A new perspective to stress–strength models," Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Springer;The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, vol. 63(1), pages 101-115, February.
    10. Tian, Zhigang & Zuo, Ming J., 2006. "Redundancy allocation for multi-state systems using physical programming and genetic algorithms," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 91(9), pages 1049-1056.
    11. Belmansour, Ahmed-Tidjani & Nourelfath, Mustapha, 2010. "An aggregation method for performance evaluation of a tandem homogenous production line with machines having multiple failure modes," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 95(11), pages 1193-1201.
    12. Ohi, Fumio, 2013. "Lattice set theoretic treatment of multi-state coherent systems," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 86-90.
    13. Coit, David W. & Zio, Enrico, 2019. "The evolution of system reliability optimization," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).
    14. Khaled Guerraiche & Latifa Dekhici & Eric Chatelet & Abdelkader Zeblah, 2021. "Multi-Objective Electrical Power System Design Optimization Using a Modified Bat Algorithm," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(13), pages 1-19, July.
    15. Milienos, F.S. & Koutras, M.V., 2008. "A lower bound for the reliability function of multiple failure mode systems," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 78(12), pages 1639-1648, September.
    16. Kołowrocki, K. & Kwiatuszewska-Sarnecka, B., 2008. "Reliability and risk analysis of large systems with ageing components," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 93(12), pages 1821-1829.
    17. C Jacksonn & A Mosleh, 2012. "Bayesian inference with overlapping data: methodology for reliability estimation of multi-state on-demand systems," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 226(3), pages 283-294, June.
    18. Yaguang Yang, 2019. "Test based safety-critical software reliability estimation using Bayesian method and flow network structure," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 233(5), pages 847-856, October.
    19. Ramirez-Marquez, Jose Emmanuel & Coit, David W., 2007. "Multi-state component criticality analysis for reliability improvement in multi-state systems," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 92(12), pages 1608-1619.
    20. Sedlacek, Peter & Zaitseva, Elena & Levashenko, Vitaly & Kvassay, Miroslav, 2021. "Critical state of non-coherent multi-state system," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 215(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:reensy:v:203:y:2020:i:c:s0951832020305615. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/reliability-engineering-and-system-safety .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.