Ffip: a Framework for Early Assessment of Functional Failures in Complex Systems
Tolga Kurtoglu, Irem Y. Tumer · 2007
Ensuring the reliability of complex software intensive systems is becoming a critical requirement for all military and commercial aerospace applications, and becomes especially more challenging when implemented for autonomous and evolving deployments required of such applications. To ensure reliability, this research asserts that knowledge, data, and models of such complex systems must be integrated with their intended systems starting from the early design stages, hence enabling designers and engineers to plan for contingencies, redundancies, and potential changes early, before costly design decisions have been made. In this paper, a general system-level design methodology is introduced to perform simulation-based failure identification and propagation analysis of softwarehardware systems. In particular, the Functional Failure Identification and Propagation (FFIP) analysis framework is introduced as a novel approach for designing reliable software-intensive systems. A combination of function, structure, and behaviour modelling is proposed to simulate failure propagation paths and the resulting functional failures to determine mitigation options, integrating hierarchical system models with behavioural simulation and qualitative reasoning. The overall goal of this research is to develop a formal framework and simulation-based design tool for design and system engineering teams to evaluate and assess the potential of functional failures of software intensive systems throughout the lifecycle.