Variability integration in the dependability analysis of systems

Abstract

Industrial systems have become an integration of interconnected components, ever more reconfigurable and interdependent. The analysis loads of its systems are growing strongly as its new components are being used. From risk analysis point of view, we identify three phenomena related to these new systems which require new measures, the problems posed by product line usage, systems variants, and iterative design methods. They introduce are some limitations or inefficiencies into the dependability analysis, due to the lack of adequate analysis tools to perform a reliability or dependability analysis for these new systems. Especially, these tools cannot effectively account the iterative approaches in design system. Furthermore, the introduction of options or variabilities in the system is complicated or even impossible. Our goal is to provide support for dependability analysis based on Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) for product lines or systems variants during their design phase or design update. We automatically generated FMECAs from system’s model, this allow the reuse of dependability concepts through the knowledge capitalization for the system analysis during different phases system modifications or simply to consider new variabilities.