Establishing ultra-reliability by fault injection experiments

A validation procedure combines field data, arguments-from-design, and fault injection experiments to demonstrate high reliability. This paper covers integrating these elements and deriving results that reduce the fault injection effort. A typical argument about the impossibility of demonstrating ultra reliability by experiment is presented to motivate the emphasis on reducing the experimental effort. An example is used to explain the integration of field data, fault injection, arguments-from-design, and performance monitoring. This validation procedure has stringent requirements, but it is shown that these requirements are common to other procedures. There is an extended analysis on number, type, and time of fault occurrence. These results are applied to a system with an extremely high reliability requirement. They reduce the experimental effort to a moderate level