This ESPRIT Basic Research volume provides an overview of two projects intended "to contribute to making the process of designing and constructing dependable computing systems much more predictable and cost-effective". Papers on fault prevention, fault tolerance, fault removal, and fault forecasting are included.

Klappentext

This book provides an overview of the work of two successive ESPRIT Basic Research Projects on Predictably Dependable Computing Systems (PDCS), as well as their major achievements. The purpose of the projects has been "to contribute to making the process of designing and constructing dependable computing systems much more predictable and cost-effective". The book contains a carefully edited selection of papers on all four main topics in PDCS: fault prevention, fault tolerance, fault removal, and fault forecasting. Problems of real-time and distributed systems, system structuring, qualitative evaluation, and software dependability modelling are emphasized. The book reports on the latest research on PDCS from a team including many of Europe's leading researchers.

Inhalt
I. Basic Concepts.- A. Dependability Its Attributes, Impairments and Means.- References for Chapter 1.- II. Fault Prevention.- A. Analysis of Safety Requirements for Process Control Systems.- B. Real-Time System Scheduling.- C. The Time-Triggered Approach to Real-Time System Design.- D. Software Measurement: A Necessary Scientific Basis.- References for Chapter II.- III. Fault Tolerance.- A. From Recovery Blocks to Concurrent Atomic Actions.- B. Definition and Analysis of Hardware-and-Software Fault-Tolerant Architectures.- C. Failure Mode Assumptions and Assumption Coverage.- D. Rational Design of Multiple-Redundant Systems: Adjudication and Fault Treatment.- E. Dynamic Adjustment of Dependability and Efficiency in Fault-Tolerant Software.- F. Designing Secure and Reliable Applications using FragmentationRedundancy-Scattering: an Object Oriented Approach.- G. Implementing Fault Tolerant Applications Using Reflective Object-Oriented Programming.- H. The PDCS Implementation of MARS Hardware and Software.- References for Chapter III.- IV. Fault Removal.- A. Advantages and Limits of Formal Approaches for Ultra-High Dependability.- B. Software Statistical Testing.- C. An Experimental Evaluation of Formal Testing and Statistical Testing.- D. Testing Distributed Real-Time Systems: An Overview.- References for Chapter IV.- V. Fault Forecasting Fault Injection.- A. Integration and Comparison of Three Physical Fault Injection Techniques.- B. Fault Injection into VHDL Models: The MEFISTO Tool.- C. Estimators for Fault Tolerance Coverage Evaluation.- References for Chapter V.- VI. Fault Forecasting Software Reliability.- A. Software Reliability Trend Analyses: From Theoretical to Practical Considerations.- B. The Transformation Approach to the Modeling and Evaluationof Reliability and Availability Growth.- C. New Ways to Get Accurate Reliability Measures.- D. Combination of Predictions Obtained from Different Software Reliability Growth Models.- E. Dependability Modelling and Evaluation of Software Fault-Tolerant Systems.- F. Dependability Analysis of Iterative Fault-Tolerant Software Considering Correlation.- G. Validation of Ultra-High Dependability for Software-based Systems.- References for Chapter VI.- VII. Fault Forecasting Large State Space Modelling.- A. Computable Dependability Bounds for Large Markov Chains.- B. Fast Numerical Solution for a Class of Markov Models.- References for Chapter VII.- VIII. Fault Forecasting Security Modelling.- A. Towards Operational Measures of Computer Security: Concepts.- B. Towards Operational Measures of Computer Security: Experimentation and Modelling.- References for Chapter VIII.- Pdcs Publications.