Model Checking-based Software-FMEA: Assessment of Fault Tolerance and Error Detection Mechanisms

Abstract

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a systematic technique to explore the possible failure modes of individual components or subsystems and determine their potential effects at the system level. Applications of FMEA are common in case of hardware and communication failures, but analyzing software failures (SW-FMEA) poses a number of challenges. Failures may originate in permanent software faults commonly called bugs, and their effects can be very subtle and hard to predict, due to the complex nature of programs. Therefore, a behavior-based automatic method to analyze the potential effects of different types of bugs is desirable. Such a method could be used to automatically build an FMEA report about the fault effects, or to evaluate different failure mitigation and detection techniques. This paper follows the latter direction, demonstrating the use of a model checking-based automated SW-FMEA approach to evaluate error detection and fault tolerance mechanisms, demonstrated on a case study inspired by safety-critical embedded operating systems.