Software architecture and dependability

Abstract

Dependable systems are characterized by a number of attributes including: reliability, availability, safety and security. For some attributes (namely for reliability, availability, safety), there exist probability-based theoretic foundations, enabling the application of dependability analysis techniques. The goal of dependability analysis is to forecast the values of dependability attributes, based on certain properties (e.g. failure rate, MTBF, etc.) that characterize the system's constituent elements. Nowadays, architects, designers and developers build systems based on an architecture-driven approach. They specify the system's software architecture using Architecture Description Languages or other standard modeling notations like UML. Given the previous, we examine what we need to specify at the architectural level to enable the automated generation of models for dependability analysis. In this paper, we further present a prototype implementation of the proposed approach, which relies on UML specifications of dependable systems' software architectures. Moreover, we exemplify our approach using a case study system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.