A comparison of two safety-critical architectures using the safety related metrics

In this paper, we introduce two safety-related metrics to evaluate a safety-critical computer-based system, and the derivations of these metrics are reviewed using Markov models. We describe two Markov architectural configurations of the system, and the comparison based on the proposed safety-related metrics is demonstrated. The comparison results confirm and conclude that one of the two architectures performs safer than the other. After the analysis, we state that the set of safety-related metrics we have derived in this paper is a good set of measurements to evaluate the safety attribute of safety-critical systems.