Software Faults Diagnosis in Complex OTS Based Safety Critical Systems

This work addresses the problem of software fault diagnosis in complex safety critical software systems. The transient manifestations of software faults represent a challenging issue since they hamper a complete knowledge of the system fault model at design/development time. By taking into account existing diagnosis techniques, the paper proposes a novel diagnosis approach, which combines the detection and location processes. More specifically, detection and location modules have been designed to deal with partial knowledge about the system fault model. To this aim, they are tuned during system execution in order to improve diagnosis during system lifetime. A diagnosis engine has been realized to diagnose software faults in a real world middleware platform for safety critical applications. Preliminary experimental campaigns have been conducted to evaluate the proposed approach.