On the development of dependability-evaluation workbench for high-assurance system designers

High-assurance system engineering requires efficient computer-aided dependability evaluation. Although various dependability evaluation techniques and tools have been developed and studied in the last two decades, no adequate attention has been paid to allow system designers not well versed in analytic modeling to easily employ these techniques and tools. Aimed at enabling designers of high-assurance systems to profit from off-the-shelf modeling techniques and tools, we have developed a user-friendly dependability-evaluation workbench, called SDDS (System Dependability evaluation for Design Solutions), which is intended to lead the user to exploit the features and capabilities of the modeling tool SHARPE (Symbolic Hierarchical Automated Reliability and Performance Evaluator). In this paper, we first discuss the means through which we realize our goal, and then we describe SDDS´s graphical user interface via a simple example