Track 1 Session 11
10:20 to 11:20 a.m. Friday March 27, 2009

Reliability Models: From Ad-Hoc Towards Systematic Reuse

Development of reliability models can be very extensive depending on the complexity of the system under analysis. One possibility to reduce effort and costs to develop these models is to reuse them. Currently, at some companies, reuse is performed according to the individual experience of the engineers, the so called "ad-hoc reuse." Ad-hoc reuse is ineffective when the knowledge of previously developed models has to be shared among several team members. Therefore, a more suitable alternative is needed. Systematic reuse could not only help reduce the time and costs of developing reliability models, but also contribute to creating a shared reliability knowledge base. Some of the efforts of systematically reusing reliability models, in particular fault trees, have been oriented to the product line engineering paradigm. This presentation will introduce an approach to explicitly document reliability models so they can be systematically reused within a product line engineering development context.

Key Words: Reliability Models, Fault Tree Analysis, Systematic Reuse, Product Line Engineering

Carolina Gmez
University of Kaiserslautern, Siemens Corporate Technology
Germany