Modeling of externally-induced/common-cause faults in fault-tolerant systems

Modeling fault behaviors such as fault occurrences and active/benign durations is an essential step to the design and evaluation of fault-tolerant controller computers. We use a beta-binomial distribution to model fault occurrences both in the presence and in the absence of environmentally-induced (thus common-cause) faults. A multinomial distribution is used to model fault active durations. The proposed model is validated by testing it against the data generated by a simulation program that mimics a common-cause fault environment. The model is then applied to the determination of an optimal time-redundancy recovery method for EMI-induced failures in an N-modular redundant controller computer, demonstrating its utility and power