Lares - A Novel Approach For Describing System Reconfigurability In Dependability Models Of Fault-Tolerant Systems

This paper presents LARES, a novel approach to the modeling of fault-tolerant systems. We introduce a formalism for describing the structure of a system which is able to express dynamic behavior such as imperfect coverage, common cause errors, failure propagation, increase of failure rates after partial system failure, and phased missions. It is designed with the intention to provide a convenient and easy-to-learn formalism for modeling - even for non-specialists. The paper introduces the modeling language and illustrates its use by means of two non-trivial examples.