Runtime reliability monitoring for complex fault-tolerance policies

Abstract: Reliability of complex Cyber-Physical Systems is necessary to guarantee availability and/or safety of the provided services. Diverse and complex fault tolerance policies are adopted to enhance reliability, that include a varied mix of redundancy and dynamic reconfiguration to address hardware reliability, as well as specific software reliability techniques like diversity or software rejuvenation. These complex policies call for flexible runtime health checks of system executions that go beyond conventional runtime monitoring of pre-programmed health conditions, also in order to minimize maintenance costs. Defining a suitable monitoring model in the application of this method in complex systems is still a challenge. In this paper we propose a novel approach, Reliability Based Monitoring (RBM), for a flexible runtime monitoring of reliability in complex systems, that exploits a hierarchical reliability model periodically applied to runtime diagnostics data: this allows to dynamically plan maintenance activities aimed at prevent failures. As a proof of concept, we show how to apply RBM to a 2oo3 software system implementing different fault-tolerant policies.