Fault identification with binary adaptive fireflies in parallel and distributed systems

The efficient identification of hardware and software faults in parallel and distributed systems still remains a serious challenge in today´s most prolific decentralized environments. System-level fault diagnosis is concerned with the detection of all faulty nodes in a set of interconnected units. This is accomplished by thoroughly examining the collection of outcomes of all tests carried out by the nodes under a particular test model. Such task has non-polynomial complexity and can be posed as a combinatorial optimization problem, whose optimal solution has been sought through bio-inspired methods like genetic algorithms, ant colonies and artificial immune systems. In this paper, we employ a swarm of artificial fireflies to quickly and reliably navigate across the search space of all feasible sets of faulty units under the invalidation and comparison test models. Our approach uses a binary encoding of the potential solutions (fireflies), an adaptive light absorption coefficient to accelerate the search and problem-specific knowledge to handle infeasible solutions. The empirical analysis confirms that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing techniques in terms of convergence speed and memory requirements, thus becoming a viable approach for real-time fault diagnosis in large-size systems.