Reliability models in architecture description languages
Aleksandar Dimov, Sylvia Ilieva · 2007
In recent years, component-based approach has shown a great potential in cost and time reduction of software development. Research in non-functional characteristics also becomes a major issue in this domain. For these reasons, special interest raises the ability for compositional reasoning, in a formal way, about non-functional characteristics. In this paper, we focus the attention on one of them, namely reliability. Although, in the last 20 years, there appeared a number of Component-Based Reliability Models (CBRMs), there does not exist enough efforts to relate CBRM to methods for description of software architecture. Instead, a separate research direction in Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) evolved independently. The paper shows a way to bridge the gap between ADLs and CBRMs and lay out possibilities for comparison of different CBRMs. An extension of Petri-nets and Finite-State Machines, called Generalized Nets, is used to specify software architecture.