Model Checking a Fault-Tolerant Startup Algorithm: From Design Exploration To Exhaustive Fault Simulation

  • Authors:
  • Wilfried Steiner;John Rushby;Maria Sorea;Holger Pfeifer

  • Affiliations:
  • Technische Universität Wien, Austria;SRI International, USA;Universität Ulm, Germany;Universität Ulm, Germany

  • Venue:
  • DSN '04 Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The increasing performance of modern model-checkingtools offers high potential for the computer-aided designof fault-tolerant algorithms. Instead of relying on humanimagination to generate taxing failure scenarios to probea fault-tolerant algorithm during development, we definethe fault behavior of a faulty process at its interfaces tothe remaining system and use model checking to automaticallyexamine all possible failure scenarios. We call this approach"exhaustive fault simulation". In this paper we illustrateexhaustive fault simulation using a new startup algorithmfor the Time-Triggered Architecture (TTA) and showthat this approach is fast enough to be deployed in the designloop. We use the SAL toolset from SRI for our experimentsand describe an approach to modeling and analyzingfault-tolerant algorithms that exploits the capabilities oftools such as this.