Towards Software Health Management with Bayesian Networks Position Paper

More and more systems (e.g., aircraft, machinery, cars) rely heavily on software, which performs safety-critical opera-tions. Assuring software safety though traditional V&V has become a tremendous, if not impossible task, given the grow-ing size and complexity of the software. We propose that iSWHM (Integrated SoftWare Health Management) can increase safety and reliability of high-assurance software systems. iSWHM uses advanced tech-niques from the area of system health management in order to continuously monitor the behavior of the software during operation, quickly detect anomalies and perform automatic and reliable root-cause analysis, while not replacing tradi-tional V&V. Information provided by the iSWHM system can be used for automatic mitigation mechanisms (e.g., re-covery, dynamic reconfiguration) or presented to a human operator. iSWHM’s prognostic capabilities will further im-prove reliability and availability as it provides information about soon-to-occur failures or looming performance bottle-necks. In this paper, we will discuss challenges and future potential and describe how Bayesian networks (BN) could be used for iSWHM modeling