A Dynamic Behaviour and Reliability Evaluation Method for Applications That Are Based on Asynchronous Processing Nodes

Many embedded and distributed applications are based on processing nodes that perform parallel processing tasks. Unfortunately, it is difficult to evaluate the overall behaviour of this kind of applications because the overall behaviour consists of 1) the execution-paths of asynchronous processing nodes and of 2) messages that either activate or deactivate processing nodes to perform parallel processing tasks. In order to facilitate behaviour and reliability evaluation of applications doing parallel processing, we developed a method that: 1) is capable of composing an overall representation for parallel behaviours and recognizing both the defined use cases and undetermined behaviours from this representation and 2) supports calculation of use case-specific reliability values for components. In this paper, we describe the method, present a ComponentBee tool that implements the method and supports behaviour and reliability evaluation of multithreaded Java applications, and finally demonstrate the use of the method with a case study.