An integrated reliability model of hardware-software system

In real-time systems, hardware and software interact to accomplish a specific task. The presence of both hardware and software causes difficulties in validating real-time systems. A common obstacle is the lack of formal methods that can be used to validate both hardware and software. In this paper, we develop a unified reliability model that accounts for both hardware failures and software failures. We illustrate the unified hardware & software modeling approach by applying it to failure data from several real-world projects. The unified model has matched actual reliability very well and provided better accuracy.