Investigate the Relation between the Correctness and the Number of Versions of Fault Tolerant Software System

In this paper, we generalize several techniques in developing Fault Tolerant Software. We introduce property “Correctness" in evaluating N-version Systems and compare it to some commonly used properties such as reliability or availability. We also find out the relation between this property and the number of versions of system. Our experiments to verify the correctness and the applicability of the relation are also presented.




References:
[1] Algirdas Avizienis and L. Chen, On the Implementation of N-Version
Programming for Software Fault Tolerance During Execution,
Proceedings of the IEEE COMPSAC-77, November 1977, pp. 149 - 155.
[2] lgirdas Avizienis, The Methodology of N-Version Programming, in R.
Lieu, editor, Software Fault Tolerance, John Wiley & Sons, 1995.
[3] EEE Std 982.2-1988, IEEE Guide for the Use of IEEE Standard
Dictionary of Measures to Produce Reliable Software, 1998.
[4] G. Latif-Shabgahi, A. J. Hirst, and S. Bennett "A novel family of
weighted average voters for fault-tolerant computer control systems" ,
2004
[5] Lorczak, P.R., Caglayan, A.K., and Eckhardt, D.E., "A Theoretical
Investigation of Generalized Voters", Digest of papers FTCS-19: IEEE
19th Ann. Int. Symp. on Fault- Tolerant Computing Systems, Chicago,
IL, pp. 444-451, 1989.
[6] Michael R. Lyu, editor, Software Fault Tolerance, John Wiley & Sons, 1995.
[7] NASA Organization, "Software Fault Tolerance: A tutorial", 2000
[8] Brian Randell, System Structure for Software Fault Tolerance, IEEE
Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-1, No. 2, June 1975, pp.
220 -232.
[9] Brian Randell and Jie Xu, The Evolution of the Recovery Block
Concept, in Software Fault Tolerance, Michael R. Lyu, editor, Wiley,
1995, pp. 1 - 21.