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

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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.

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Notes

  1. In such cases, the actual implementation of the function may not be available. However, if the values returned by the function effect downstream computation, then we assume that the functional specification is known. That is definitely required for carrying out a “whole-program” analysis.

  2. In that way, one may model any distribution as piecewise uniform discrete distribution.

  3. This restriction is required for source level static analysis as will be revealed later.

  4. The value of an input variable is bounded by the number of bits used by the data type in the worst case.

  5. f defines the data flow relationship between iterator value and number of loop iterations.

  6. The largeness is presently defined by a threshold parameter in our implementation.

  7. We do not provide any specific statement class for assertions and model their semantics using that of if-else.

  8. A child region can be generated in many shapes but following [56], we also restrict ourselves to regions that are hypercuboid in shape.

  9. \({\varGamma }_B\) and \({\varGamma }_M\) are the base and max configurations of the system respectively.

  10. It may be noted that the reduction in execution time for the reliability target 0.995 happens for all the MSA algorithm variants since the binary nature of the search is always able to quickly detect any reliability target being unreachable (as is the case with 0.995).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    Saurav Kumar Ghosh, P. Vishnuvardhan, Soumyajit Dey & Partha Pratim Chakrabarti

  2. Capillary Technologies, Bengaluru, India

    Satya Gautam Vadlamudi

  3. Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai, India

    Aritra Hazra

Authors
  1. Saurav Kumar Ghosh
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  2. P. Vishnuvardhan
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  3. Satya Gautam Vadlamudi
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  4. Aritra Hazra
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  5. Soumyajit Dey
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  6. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Saurav Kumar Ghosh.

Additional information

This work was supported by a TCS Research Fellowship.

Appendix

Appendix

In this section we present the results that were used to plot Fig. 9 in Table 9. We compare the performance of MSA-I and MSA-II over the ABS Case Study with 12 reliability options for each component.

Table 9 Performance comparison of MSA-I and MSA-II
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Ghosh, S.K., Vishnuvardhan, P., Vadlamudi, S.G. et al. RELSPEC: a framework for reliability aware design of component based embedded systems. Des Autom Embed Syst 21, 37–87 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10617-017-9183-y

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