An automated dependability analysis method for COTS-based systems

The increasing application of COTS-components and component-based software engineering has entailed the development of appropriate component specifications. In the embedded systems domain it would be desirable to benefit from these component specifications to integrate and automate safety and reliability analysis. For this reason, we propose in this paper a component-based dependability analysis technique that annotates components with failure mode assumptions. The probabilities and dependencies of these failure modes are specified by Component Fault Trees (CFT's). Based on these CFT's and the architectural model the propagation of failures throughout the system can be automatically determined and a quantitative analysis is possible.