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Survey of combined hardware–software reliability prediction approaches from architectural and system failure viewpoint

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Abstract

Apart from hardware and software-specific failures, failures arising from hardware–software interaction causes notorious system failures. Researches have reported two types of interaction failures in a system: hardware-driven software failure and software-driven hardware failure. An efficient reliability prediction approaches must consider all types of interactions. We critically analyse the existing reliability prediction models for the combined hardware–software system. We also propose a comparison framework to evaluate the existing reliability models for combined hardware–software systems. The results of our study suggest that none of the considered approaches completely satisfy the characteristics of a good reliability prediction model. Existing approaches hardly consider all types of hardware–software interactions. They also fail to consider reliability aspects of distributed systems where a system interacts with external devices. Our proposed comparison framework can be used as a benchmark to construct an efficient reliability prediction model for combined hardware–software systems.

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Acknowledgements

This work is carried out at the Subir Chowdhury School of Quality and Reliability, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. We thank all the faculty members, co-researchers and staffs of the school for their co-operation and support. A special thanks to Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India for funding this research.

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  1. Subir Chowdhury School of Quality and Reliability, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, India

    Sourav Sinha & Neeraj Kumar Goyal

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    Rajib Mall

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  1. Sourav Sinha
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  2. Neeraj Kumar Goyal
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  3. Rajib Mall
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Correspondence to Sourav Sinha.

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Sinha, S., Goyal, N.K. & Mall, R. Survey of combined hardware–software reliability prediction approaches from architectural and system failure viewpoint. Int J Syst Assur Eng Manag 10, 453–474 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-019-00811-y

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