Fault Injection and Dependability Evaluation

of Fault-Tolerant Systems

Jean Arlat, Alain Costes, Yves Crouzet, Jean-Claude Laprie, David Powell

Abstract

The authors describe a dependability evaluation method based on fault injection that establishes the link between the experimental evaluation of the fault tolerance process and the fault occurrence process. The main characteristics of a fault injection test sequence aimed at evaluating the coverage of the fault tolerance process are presented. Emphasis is given to the derivation of experimental measures. The various steps by which the fault occurrence and fault tolerance processes are combined to evaluate dependability measures are identified and their interactions are analyzed. The method is illustrated by an application to the dependability evaluation of the distributed fault-tolerant architecture of the Esprit Delta-4 Project.

Keywords: Coverage, dependability modeling and evaluation, experimental evaluation, fault injection, fault tolerance, Markov chains.