Failure Analysis of Large-Scale High Assurance Systems

Significant savings in the life-cycle costs of modern systems can be achieved if they are concurrently engineered with three design criteria: performance, reliability, and ease of maintenance. The proposed effort will address the development of a comprehensive model-based environment that supports the design evaluation process for large-scale system of systems by providing for the analysis of failure effects (including the effects of human failure), testability analysis, and reliability analysis. The environment will build upon Qualtech Systems¿ (QSI) multi-signal modeling methodology that forms the core in a suite of commercial tools presently used for fault modeling, maintenance and troubleshooting of complex systems. The proposed effort will be conducted in consultation with Aptima, Inc., an industry leader in Human Engineering. In Phase I, the issues in extending the reliability analysis and FMECA techniques, already implemented in TEAMS, to systems of systems will be investigated. We will also focus on enhancements to the GUI in QSI¿s tools, TEAMS, and to its underlying multi-signal modeling methodology for developing a visualization tool for failure analysis (TEAMS-FA). A joint task force military mission will be used as an example scenario to test the utility of the developed technologies. In Phase II, TEAMS-FA development will be completed and the tool integrated with behavioral simulators for automatic multi-signal model extraction. The capability to integrate with QSI¿s diagnostic tools for post-deployment support will be a welcome by-product.