Dependability analysis of fault-tolerant systems: a literature survey

Systems with high reliability requirements are designed with a great degree of fault tolerance. These systems use extensive redundancy, have complex recovery management techniques, and are highly reconfigurable. There are two classes of problems that arise in modelling the dependability of complex fault tolerant architectures: the construction of a comprehensive model of the system, and the solution of the model once formulated. This paper surveys the literature on the research work available in the area of dependability modelling, with particular emphasis on the modelling techniques, the adopted numerical methodologies and the implemented software tools.