A Systematic Approach for Software Interference Analysis

Interferences are a common challenge in integrated systems. An interference is a failure propagation scenario in which a failure of one software component propagates to another software component via the platform´s shared computational resources. To account for this, safety standards demand freedom from interference in order to control failure propagation between mixed-critical software components. However, the analysis of potential interferences for a given system is often performed ad-hoc, for example using lists of known issues. Arguing the sufficiency of the interference analysis is difficult using such an approach, especially when dealing with new technologies for which established lists do not exist yet. To this end, this paper presents an interference analysis method that allows for the systematic identification and specification of interferences.