A Novel Reliability Assessment Method Based on the Effects of Components

Abstract

Component-based software systems play an important role in various critical areas and reliability of those systems considered significant attention. Some software reliability assessment approaches consider the impacts of different components on the system reliability but lack the analysis of fault propagation between components. In this paper, a novel reliability evaluation method is proposed, focusing on analyzing the impacts of different components based on three parameters i.e. self-influence, failure influence and fault propagation influence. First, we use the graph theory to model the component-based software system and later identify the significance of each component based on the above three parameters. Finally, the importance of each component is used for the system reliability assessment and optimization. Three existing examples are evaluated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and results show that the proposed method is able to get reasonable results that could be used for reliability optimization.