A dynamic reliability maintenance method for online software system

Software reliability is one of important characteristics for most systems. Due to dynamic properties of the system, the probability of number of visits to each component might change after a certain amount of period. To maintain the software system reliability, this paper proposed a dynamic reliability maintenance mechanism based on resource monitoring and redundant resources allocation. An open-source monitoring software, namely Glassbox, was employed to monitor the change of number of visits to a component. Then the path-based method was used to analyze the reliability of software system at the component level in run time. Sensitivity of each component was calculated using the path-based model. A greedy algorithm for re-allocating resources dynamically was proposed according to component sensitivity. Finally, some simulation experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed mechanism. The results have shown that the proposed method is effective.