Reliability Modeling of hardware and software interactions, and its applications

We classify system failures into three categories: hardware failures, software failures, and hardware-software interaction failures. We develop a unified reliability model that accounts for failures in all three categories. Hardware, and software failures are accounted for with well-known modeling approaches. In this paper, we propose a modeling methodology using Markov processes to capture hardware-software interaction failures. We illustrate the combined hardware & software modeling approach by applying it to a real telecommunication system.