Predicting the reliability of a system in its actual life-cycle conditions and estimating its time to failure is helpful in decision making to mitigate system risks. There are three approaches to prognostics: the physics-of-failure approach, the data-driven approach, and the fusion approach. A key requirement in all these approaches is identification of the appropriate parameter(s) to monitor t...

Technical systems are prevalent in many areas of our society. Nowadays they often include a considerable amount of software. Identification and avoidance of technical risks is of major importance in the development of these softwareintensive technical systems. A powerful analysis technique in the development process for technical systems is the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). This tec...

The knowledge about failures needed to solve distributed agreement problems can be expressed in terms of completeness and accuracy properties of failure detectors introduced by Chandra and Toueg. The accuracy properties they have considered restrict the false suspicions that can be made by all the processes in the system. In this paper, we deene \??accurate" failure detectors, whose accuracy pr...

The paper presents a multi-factor decision-making approach for prioritizing failure modes as an alternative to traditional approach of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). The approach is based on the ‘technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution’ (TOPSIS). The priority ranking is formulated on the basis of six parameters (failure occurrence, non-detection, maintainability...

Traditionally, failure detectors have considered a binary model whereby a given process can be either trusted or suspected. This paper defines a family of failure detectors, called accrual failure detectors, that revisits this interaction model. Accrual failure detectors associate to each process a real value representing a suspicion level. An important advantage of accrual failure detectors ov...

Unreliable failure detectors, proposed by Chandra and Toueg [2], are mechanisms that provide information about process failures. In [2], eight classes of failure detectors were defined, depending on how accurate this information is, and an algorithm implementing a failure detector of one of these classes in a partially synchronous system was presented. This algorithm is based on all-to-all comm...

The failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) approach was used to assess the potential risks for patients during the delivery of tomotherapy treatments. This study, which completed a previous investigation recently performed on the tomotherapy pretreatment phases, enabled the delineation of the delivery process tree and the identification of 30 failure modes, 9 of which were judged to be of part...

This paper argues that software engineering should not overlook the lessons learned by other engineering disciplines with longer established histories. As software engineering evolves it should focus not only on application functionality but also on mature engineering concepts such as reliability, dependability, safety, failure mode analysis, and maintenance. Software is rapidly approaching the...

The concept of software failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) has grown in attractiveness over recent years as a way of assessing the reliability of software. Like its hardware counterpart, software FMEA is immensely tedious for an engineer to perform, as well as being error-prone. This paper presents the implementation of a novel method for automating code-level software FMEA based on treat...

Communicating failure mode information during design and manufacturing is a crucial task for failure prevention. Most processes use Failure Modes and Effects types of analyses, as well as prior knowledge and experience, to determine the potential modes of failures a product might encounter during its lifetime. When new products are being considered and designed, this knowledge and information i...