Optimal component selection of COTS based software system under consensus recovery block scheme incorporating execution time

Abstract

Computer based systems have increased dramatically in scope, complexity, pervasiveness. Most industries are highly dependent on computers for their basic day to day functioning. Safe & reliable software operations are an essential requirement for many systems across different industries. The number of functions to be included in a software system is decided during the software development. Any software system must be constructed in such a way that execution can resume even after the occurrence of failure with minimal loss of data and time. Such software systems which can continue execution even in presence of faults are called fault tolerant software. When failure occurs one of the redundant software modules get executed and prevent system failure. The fault tolerant software systems are usually developed by integrating COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software components. The motivation for using COTS components is that they will reduce overall system development costs and reduce development time. In this paper, reliability models for fault tolerant consensus recovery blocks are analyzed. In first optimization model, we formulate joint optimization problem in which reliability maximization of software system and execution time minimization for each function of software system are considered under budgetary constraint. In the second model the issue of compatibility among alternatives available for different modules, is discussed. Numerical illustrations are provided to demonstrate the developed models.