A Dependability Assessment Process for Ensuring Consistent Provisioning of Network Recovery

AbstractWe have developed an engineering method to detect errors in provisioning automated recovery processes in multilayer and multi-protocol communications transport networks. Our dependability assessment process leverages inference techniques provided by Semantic Web technologies in order to detect network-device provisioning errors. Provisioning should be accompanied by methodologies, processes, and activities to ensure that it can be trusted to achieve a desired network state. Our method takes into account unique constraints in the telecommunications domain including bottom-up evolution of physical layer technologies to provide connectivity and lack of a universal model of network functionality. We apply our method to assessing the correctness of provisioning decisions for a protection switching application in a transport network in both the spatial and temporal domains

Problem Oriented Engineering for Software Safety

Safety critical systems must satisfy stringent safety standards and there development requires the use of specialist safe software system development (SSSD) approaches as the complexity and penetration of these systems increases. These SSSD approaches satisfy certain useful properties that make them suitable for safety system development. The first objective of this thesis is to select a candidate SSSD approach and evaluate its capabilities against a set of useful properties identified from reviewing a group of existing SSSD approaches, and thus show that this candidate SSSD approach is appropriate for use in safety system development. In addition, a second objective is to use this candidate SSSD approach to improve the early life cycle phase of an existing industrial safety development process used to develop embedded avionics applications. In particular to allow issues to be resolved earlier in the development, which are currently not being uncovered until much later in the development when they are much more difficult and expensive to correct. This involved the identification of further properties and issues that the candidate SSSD approach must address. The overall aim is to demonstrate that this candidate SSSD approach can be used in the early phase of a safety system development to derive a validated specification that can be subjected to safety analysis to show that it satisfies the identified system safety properties and thus forms a viable basis for the rest of the development

Certifying Software Component Performance Specifications

In component-based software engineering, performance prediction approaches support the design of business information systems on the architectural level. They are based on behavior specifications of components. This work presents a round-trip approach for using, assessing, and certifying the accuracy of parameterized, probabilistic, deterministic, and concurrent performance specifications. Its applicability and effectiveness are demonstrated using the CoCoME benchmark

Building dependability arguments for software intensive systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-308).A method is introduced for structuring and guiding the development of end-to-end dependability arguments. The goal is to establish high-level requirements of complex software-intensive systems, especially properties that cross-cut normal functional decomposition. The resulting argument documents and validates the justification of system-level claims by tracing them down to component-level substantiation, such as automatic code analysis or cryptographic proofs. The method is evaluated on case studies drawn from the Burr Proton Therapy Center, operating at Massachusetts General Hospital, and on the Pret a Voter cryptographic voting system, developed at the University of Newcastle.by Robert Morrison Seater.Ph.D

The essential synthesis of problem frames and assurance cases

Problem frames and assurance cases are two current research areas that can improve—and have improved—system dependability, in critical and noncritical systems alike. While these two techniques are effective separately, their synthesis is much more powerful. This paper describes the rationale behind the synthesis, the particular pieces that influence each other, and the beginning of a process to integrate th