ABSTRACT
Due to the dynamic behavior of reconfigurable faulttolerant systems, the creation of stochastic dependability models is a difficult task. Traditional techniques like fault trees or reliability block diagrams are no longer sufficient in many cases, because they assume all components to be of a Boolean nature. However, in today’s adaptable and reconfigurable systems, components must be described by more than the states ‘active’ and ‘failed’ in order to reflect the different roles of a component in a reconfigurable system. Moreover, often the system itself is not considered to be Boolean, but different failure classes are discriminated. Finally, the basic events (component failures and repairs) cannot be assumed to be independent, but common cause failure, failure propagation, limited repair capacities etc. must be taken into account.
