Reliability analysis in model-driven development of embedded systems

Numerous techniques for modeling reliability aspects are applicable in research and industry. However, reliability models are often specialized artifacts; they are created once by specialists and then tend to remain unmaintained, yielding outdated and inaccurate models after short periods of time. This degradation of reliability models can be prevented by integrating them with design models, which improves their visibility to developers and keeps them consistent with other artifacts. Our UML-based approach presented in this paper supports this by enabling integrated modeling of reliability aspects and other, e.g. functional and physical aspects of systems under development. This is achieved by extending the UML through profiles that support the modeling of reliability aspects. We present a notation for the modeling of functions and function networks in combination with Dynamic Reliability Block Diagrams (DRBDs). DRBDs extend standard reliability block diagrams with the possibility of modeling dynamic behaviors and dependencies. Integration of these aspects into a model-driven approach improves model traceability and consistency, and enables integrated reliability modeling.