Optimising the reliability that can be claimed for a software-based system based on failure-free tests of its components
This work provides a more efficient method for reliability engineers to claim system reliability based on component tests, though it is incremental as it builds on prior algorithmic approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing conservative confidence bounds on system reliability from component tests, presenting a numerical method based on linear programming that is more efficient than existing integer programming approaches and can derive optimal test plans for any system structure.
This short paper describes a numerical method for optimising the conservative confidence bound on the reliability of a system based on tests of its individual components. This is an alternative to the algorithmic approaches identified in Bishop and Povyakalo (RESS 2020). For a given maximum number of component tests, the numerical method can derive an optimal test plan for any arbitrary system structure. The optimisation method is based on linear programming which is more efficient that the alternative integer programming. In addition, the optimisation process need only be performed once for any given system structure as the solution can be re-used to compute an optimal integer test plan for a different maximum number of component tests. This approach might have broader application to other optimisation problems that are normally implemented using integer programming methods.