Structured stochastic modeling of fault-tolerant systems

Fault-tolerant mechanisms have been increasingly used to develop safety-critical systems. Therefore, the accurate description of these mechanisms is crucial if we do not want their use to bring any kind of unexpected result due to the misinterpretation of their features. The paper presents a new way of precisely describing fault tolerant mechanisms using a formalism that has a Markovian behavior. More specifically, we describe how to apply stochastic automata networks (SAN) to describe a dependable multiparty interaction (DMI) mechanism.