Diagnosis Modelling for Dependability Assessment of Fault-Tolerant Systems Based on Stochastic Activity Networks

The growing demand for safety, reliability, availability and maintainability in modern technological systems has led these systems to become more and more complex. To improve their dependability, many features and subsystems are employed like the diagnosis system, control system, backup systems, and so on. These subsystems have all their own dynamic, reliability and performances and interact with each other in order to provide a dependable and fault‐tolerant system. This makes the dependability analysis and assessment very difficult. This paper proposes a method to completely model the diagnosis procedure in fault‐tolerant systems using stochastic activity networks. Combined with Monte Carlo simulation, this will allow the dependability assessment by including the diagnosis parameters and performances explicitly.