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Reliability growth modeling and optimal release policy under fuzzy environment of an N-version programming system incorporating the effect of fault removal efficiency

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Abstract

Failure of a safety critical system can lead to big losses. Very high software reliability is required for automating the working of systems such as aircraft controller and nuclear reactor controller software systems. Fault-tolerant softwares are used to increase the overall reliability of software systems. Fault tolerance is achieved using the fault-tolerant schemes such as fault recovery (recovery block scheme), fault masking (N-version programming (NVP)) or a combination of both (Hybrid scheme). These softwares incorporate the ability of system survival even on a failure. Many researchers in the field of software engineering have done excellent work to study the reliability of fault-tolerant systems. Most of them consider the stable system reliability. Few attempts have been made in reliability modeling to study the reliability growth for an NVP system. Recently, a model was proposed to analyze the reliability growth of an NVP system incorporating the effect of fault removal efficiency. In this model, a proportion of the number of failures is assumed to be a measure of fault generation while an appropriate measure of fault generation should be the proportion of faults removed. In this paper, we first propose a testing efficiency model incorporating the effect of imperfect fault debugging and error generation. Using this model, a software reliability growth model (SRGM) is developed to model the reliability growth of an NVP system. The proposed model is useful for practical applications and can provide the measures of debugging effectiveness and additional workload or skilled professional required. It is very important for a developer to determine the optimal release time of the software to improve its performance in terms of competition and cost. In this paper, we also formulate the optimal software release time problem for a 3VP system under fuzzy environment and discuss a the fuzzy optimization technique for solving the problem with a numerical illustration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110 007, India

    P. K. Kapur, Anshu Gupta & P. C. Jha

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  1. P. K. Kapur
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  2. Anshu Gupta
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  3. P. C. Jha
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Correspondence to P. K. Kapur.

Additional information

P. K. Kapur received his Ph.D. degree in operational research from University of Delhi in 1977. He is a professor and former head of Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi. He is former president of Operational Research Society of India. He has published more than 125 research papers in the areas of hardware reliability, optimization, queueing theory, maintenance and software reliability. He has edited three volumes and currently editing the fourth volume on quality, reliability and IT. He has co-authored the book Contributions to Hardware and Software Reliability published by World Scientific, Singapore. He has edited special issues of International Journal of Quality Reliability and Safety Engineering, USA, 2004, OPSEARCH, India, 2005, and International Journal of Performability Engineering, India, 2006. He has organized International Conferences on Quality Reliability and Information Technology in 2000, 2003 and 2006. He has guided M.Tech and Ph.D. theses in computer science as well as in operational research. He is again invited to edit a special issue on International Journal of Quality Reliability and Safety Engineering (IQRSE), 2007, and a special issue of Communications on Dependability and Quality Management, Belgrade, Serbia. He has traveled extensively in India and abroad and delivered invited talks. He is cited in Marquis Who’s Who in the World.

His research interests include hardware and software reliability, optimization, queuing theory, innovation diffusion modeling, and numerical computation of stochastic models and marketing.

Anshu Gupta received her M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in operational research from University of Delhi, in 2003 and 2005, respectively. She is presently a senior research fellow at Department of Operational Research.

Her research interests include modeling and optimization in software reliability and marketing.

P. C. Jha received his Masters, M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Delhi in 1986, 1988 and 2004 respectively. He is a reader at Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi. He has published more than 25 research papers in the areas of software reliability, marketing and optimization in Indian and international journals, and edited books. He has guided Masters projects and MBA dissertations, and is supervising Ph.D. students in operational research.

His research interests include hardware and software reliability, optimization, queuing theory, innovation diffusion modeling, and numerical computation of stochastic models and marketing.

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Kapur, P.K., Gupta, A. & Jha, P.C. Reliability growth modeling and optimal release policy under fuzzy environment of an N-version programming system incorporating the effect of fault removal efficiency. Int J Automat Comput 4, 369–379 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-007-0369-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-007-0369-9

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