A method to determine equivalent fault classes for permanent and transient faults

Abstract

The expanding size and complexity of dependable computing systems has significantly increased their cost while complicating the estimation of system dependability attributes such as fault coverage and latency. The increasing requirements of safety and reliability for a dependable system, however, have made the evaluation of dependability attributes a crucial task. One approach to performing such an evaluation is through fault injection. The development of a method which enumerates the equivalent faults associated with a given fault injection experiment would significantly reduce the amount of effort required to measure dependability parameters to the desired degree of accuracy and confidence. This research has developed a new method for determining the set of equivalent faults for either a permanent or transient fault injection experiment. The primary objective of the research effort was to expand the data obtained from a single fault injection experiment into a set of data associated with the equivalent fault set. The end result is an automated method for determining equivalent faults from a set of fault injection experiments. The expanded equivalent data sets are then evaluated to determine dependability parameter estimates for fault coverage and error latency.