Multi-software reliability allocation in multimedia systems with budget constraints using Dempster-Shafer theory and improved differential evolution

In multimedia platform with many applications, reliability allocation plays an important role in the design of a software and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Thus far, the issues of software reliability allocation have been discussed from many aspects, such as mathematical models and solutions to maximize the reliability. However, most of this research has concentrated on single software. The goal of this work is to investigate the possibility of solving multi-software reliability allocation in multimedia systems with budget constraints. For this purpose, we first develop an architecture-based multi-software Budget-Constrained Reliability-maximization model. In addition, we introduce Dempster–Shafer theory to identify the relative reliability weights of each element in the proposed model and present a searching algorithm based on differential evolution and encoding repair. Finally, contrast experiments are illustrated to demonstrate the proposed methods. & 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.