Importance Sampling Based Safety-Critical Software Statistical Testing Acceleration

It is necessary to assess the reliability of safety-critical software to a high degree of confidence before they are deployed in the field. However, safety-critical software often includes some rarely executed critical operations that are often inadequately tested in statistical testing based reliability estimation. This paper discusses software statistical testing acceleration based on importance sampling technique. When both the critical operations and the entire software are adequately tested, the method can still get the unbiased software reliability from the test results with much less test cases. Thus, the statistical testing cost of safety-critical software can be reduced effectively The simulated annealing algorithm for calculating optimum transition probabilities of the Markov chain usage model for software statistical testing accelerating is also presented.