Reliability Analysis of Component Software Based on Stochastic Petri Nets

The models suggested at present have certain application conditions and ranges, and most of them are not able to satisfy the requirements of complicated and volatile application environments. This paper presents a method based on stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) that evaluates component software reliability at the early stages of software development. The reliability model built with that method can describe the process of dynamic changes of software well and it also considers the factors that affect software reliability by analyzing the characteristic of software architecture. The major drawback of SPN models is the state space explosion with increasing model complexity. In this paper, the problem is resolved by the decomposition of software architecture and one kind of decomposition technique introduced by Koriem (1999). Finally, we illustrate and discuss the numerical reliability results obtained from the proposed method. It has been shown that the suggested method provides a powerful means of analyzing software reliability after software running for a period of time.