A new approach to build a low-level malicious fault list starting from high-level description and alternative graphs

In this paper a new approach is presented to build a list of faults to be used by the fault injection environment; the list is built starting from a high-level description of the system. The approach especially aims at identifying malicious faults, i.e. faults having a critical impact on the system reliability. To overcome the complexity problem inherent in low-level descriptions, high-level ones are exploited, and alternative graphs are applied to carry our the cause-effect analysis, to build up a fault tree and to carry out fault collapsing. The reduced high-level malicious fault list is converted so that it can be used together with the low level description for the final fault injection