A new method for increasing the reliability of multiversion software systems using software breeding

The paper proposes a new method for increasing the reliability of multiversion software systems. The software using software breeding is more reliable than one using N version programming. But software breeding is not suitable for real time application because program versions are executed several times for detecting faulty modules. In the proposed method, the detection of faulty modules is performed in the background when program versions fail and the software continues the execution in the foreground. When the detection of faulty modules is finished, the combination of module versions in program versions are changed. Ten simulations, each of which executed program versions 10⁶ times, were performed to analyse the effectiveness of the new method. This resulted in the reduction of the number of failures to range from 33% to 76% with an average of 56%