Reliability and performance analysis of hardware–software systems with fault-tolerant software components

This paper presents an algorithm for evaluating reliability and expected execution time for systems consisting of fault-tolerant software components running on several hardware units. The components are built from functionally equivalent but independently developed versions characterized by different reliability and execution time. Different number of versions can be executed simultaneously depending on the number of available units. The system reliability is defined as the probability that the system produces a correct output in a specified time.