The design description language of MARPLE: reliability analysis during system design

The reliability of software based systems in application areas like distributed process control or CIM is largely determined during the design process: overall hardware architecture, software structure, and their mutual mapping. Early considerations of such reliability issues allow for relatively easy adjustments in order to countermeasure costly system malfunctions. MARPLE is a tool for automatic generation of reliability models. The important difference from other tools in the field is that MARPLE starts from a general design description of the system and finally arrives at an appropriate reliability model (which is then processed by state-of-the-art tools for reliability analysis). This paper concentrates on MARPLE´s interface with design systems, i.e. the design description language DDL, and on the reliability aspects relevant during the design process